When the baro of the Manouches on 7683Gypsy accused the baro of the Frinkulescheti on 8102Rom of raping his daughter, produced half a dozen witnesses and pictures of his battered child as irrefutable proof, and was ready to launch a war of retribution and genocide, it was Star Guards John, James, and Joseph Smith who stepped in and proved the whole thing was nothing but a setup for extortion between Gypsy vitsas who had been bitter enemies since before Columbus sailed. The three Guards managed to achieve a workable truce where no gold changed hands, voluntarily or otherwise. “Well, not until after we left, anyway,” Joseph said later. “With the Romany, gadje never really know what’s going on.”
“What the hell’s a gadje?” a mystified Charlie wanted to know.
“Anyone who isn’t Romany,” he replied.
“Oh.”
When 7011Lucky Strike was ready to tranship a load of processed plutonium, it was Star Guards Caleb O’Hara, Perry Austin, Sandy O’Connor, and Kelolo Kamehameha who escorted the ore and the ore’s twelve very nervous, very trigger-happy quarrymen from refinery to Terra-bound Volksrocket, across eighteen degrees of black, lonely, and for the most part uncharted Belt, through two ambushes, three equipment failures, one life-support malfunction, and a mutiny. Every kilogram of ore made it in to Ceres and so did eleven of the miners, although two of them were a little battered. The ore was later valued by the Terra-Luna Mines assayer at Piazzi City at a little over five hundred million Alliance dollars. At the time, O’Connor and Kamehameha were pulling down something in the neighborhood of five thousand Alliance dollars a month. Perry, as usual, took out her biggest bonus in accrued mythology.
Most of the Star Guards were no more than kids of twenty-five or younger, but I never saw one of them take sides in a fight, or reveal to one miner the location of another’s claim, or overstep the lines of his or her authority in any way. The biggest problem they had to face was what happened as a result of cabin fever, a combination of lethargy, boredom, and scurvy (a result of the Belter’s typical three-B diet, beans, bacon, and bread) that could result in the breaking of lifetime friendships, the onset of madness, and frequently death, often self-inflicted. The Star Guard contributed a humane conscience to a frontier whose first settlers only too often were devoid of morality or scruple.
How did it happen? Well, you could say Caleb and his crew had made an inspired selection of personnel and had devised a excellent course of training. You could say these kids were aware that they were building a legend and for pride’s sake lived up to it. You could say that since most of them came from money in the first place they weren’t likely to be seduced from their sworn duty by that particular temptation, at least.
You could say all those things, and all of them would be true, and none of them would be true. The fact remained that after the first year the Star Guards seldom had to raise their voices to ensure compliance, almost never had to give an order twice, and only rarely had to recharge the ammopaks on their sonic rifles. Four years after our arrival, the Belt boasted a constabulary force that in a moment of weakness Lodge admitted was superior in execution of duty even to the Space Patrol.
“Of course, the Patrol has an entire world and a planetary satellite with a couple of dozen settlements and four space habitats to monitor,” she added hastily, as if she expected her uncle’s ghost to roar in outrage at such heresy.
“Of course,” I agreed, poker-faced. “With billions of people to answer for.”
“Indeed,” Perry said without expression. “And entire nations to answer to.”
Caleb almost smiled.
· · ·
Whitney Burkette and Claire Bankhead, with Simon poking his nose in occasionally, were developing a “Little Bang” explosive designed to meet all my specifications, “and brush your teeth with besides,” as Simon put it.
“We call it pahoehoe,” Claire reported.
“Pa-what?”
“It was Maile’s idea. It’s what they call a ropy, fast-moving kind of lava on the Big Island, she says. Sort of melts down everything that gets in its way. It fits.”
“How soon before we can test it?”
Whitney lifted one eyebrow ever so slightly and tilted his head back so he could look down his nose at me. “These things really must not be rushed, Star.”
“How soon?”
Whitney looked disapprovingly at me for another moment before condescending to reply. “We may conceivably be ready to test a model, say, possibly in six months time. Perhaps.”
The design program was moving ahead more rapidly. For a population of ten thousand people, Roger was estimating six hundred thousand square meters of arable land, along with water, soil, and nitrates in proportion, and a whole bunch of sunshine. For those worlds—everyone was calling them worlds by now—which would want light industry, it would be carried on within the habitat. Heavy industry would make use of zero gravity at the world’s poles, and the sphere must be plumbed with power and connecting corridors accordingly.
Forty-five degrees up from the “equator” of our sphere, gravity on the inner surface would be reduced to seventy percent of onegee, and we would not build homes any higher—Charlie decreed that once the settlers determined their physiological tolerance, they could build higher if they wished. “After all, they can do whatever they want after they move in,” she said.
“And their last check clears,” Archy added.
Simon’s design for “The First New World” called for a shallow river to circumnavigate the sphere, and that meant beaches and swimming holes. Windows for feeding solar rays into the habitat would be placed at both axis. With complete solar shielding, venting the heat of ten thousand people would be essential, and Whitney and Archy designed axial passageways fifty meters in diameter through which heat would disperse through external radiators. Coincidentally these same passages would provide access to vacuum and transportation.
“What about the test model?” Simon said one morning.
“What about it?” I replied. I was playing jacks with Paddy, and losing.
“We wanted something small and flashy,” he said. “An aquarium that Frank changed into a mini-ocean by sending us those damn salmon.”
“So?”
“So,” he said, sitting down at the galley table and rolling out a blueprint. “Look. We’ve got a hundred-meter sphere, see?”
I gave the drawing a cursory glance, and slid the pigs in the pen three at a time. “Nice. I like the world inside a world concept. I take it the zookeepers will be working inside the interior sphere.”
“That’s the idea, but the stresses involved with putting spin on that much water, keeping the interior sphere stable, and providing complete access for the maintenance technicians have got us stumped. One axial passageway’s not going to cut it.”
“Hmmm.” Four pigs in the pen. The ball bounced off the back of my hand and Paddy giggled. I sighed and pushed the ball and jacks over to her. She was on round the world already. I watched her tiny hands for a moment, and then I snatched a jack out of her reach.
She was indignant. “Mommy! You’re cheating!”
I held the jack out to Simon. “If one passageway won’t do it—”
His eyes narrowed as he looked from my face to the jack. He took it gingerly between a thumb and one finger and set it between us on the table. I reached out and gave it a spin, and it twirled around on point for a few seconds before coming to rest on two arms. “One, two, three, four, five, six,” he muttered. “Four at right angles on the equator, two axial if you start counting from the center, we could run the creek substitutes in spirals up the outside of them and seed from the top.” He was roughing it in on the blueprint. “Access hatches at all levels and that way we can get at the king crab on the outer rim—”
“King crab?” I said. “What king crab?”
“Umm,” he said absently, rolling up the blueprint and getting to his feet. “Frank sent us some eggs.” He went away, muttering to himself. Paddy rescued her jack, compl
eted round the world, and went on to sheep over the fence.
The sphere for those of us without gills would rotate once every thirty-one seconds, providing onegee for everyone in their homes along the tropical degree latitudes. When at work, people would be moving in and out of various degrees of gravity, but Charlie worked up a chart and ruled that the one-gee at home should maintain muscle tone and strength without special exercise.
“By the way,” Simon said one day. “Who’s going to run these microcosms of humanity once they’re finished?”
I stared at him. “We’re looking at one hundred percent owner occupancy here, Simon. Who do you think?”
He said smugly, “Who’s going to teach them how?”
So I put Archy to work designing a short course in World Maintenance and Repair. Mother fretted over the slanting of the planned curriculum toward the physical sciences. “Well, Mother,” I said, not nicely, “perhaps Ari will let you teach Ecology of a Closed Environment 101 in Latin.”
She looked hard at me, looked hard at Caleb who, miracle of miracles, was actually conscious and in the same room as myself, and did not reply. But her silence was very eloquent.
When we had the final draft of specs for Homemade I, what we were looking at was a structural mass of three and a half million tons, which made everyone swallow hard and tiptoe around my projected date of model completion. The original designs called for the habitat to produce whatever Terra needed to buy; our design was to make the habitat self-supporting, even keeping in mind the reasonable supposition that like-minded worlds might group together to form a community. “We’re supposing most of these worlds are going to want to remain in Terran-to-Belt orbit,” Simon said one day.
“Yes.”
“Chances are, when the technology becomes available, they’ll be moving them wherever they want to go within those parameters.”
“Yes.”
“What kind of perturbation are all these new worlds going to have on Terran orbit? On Lunar orbit? On the orbits of Ceres and Ganymede?”
So there was something else to worry about. Sam put Leif to work on it.
Leif was up to it, young as he was. He was an open and uncomplicated person, sturdy and curious with no prejudices or preconceptions. He had an air of pleasing placidity that could trick you into believing he was just a little slow, something I had discovered on the Conestoga trip to be a kind of protective coloration to disguise his almost ferocious intelligence. I talked Mother into letting him attend the Sisters of St. Anne’s boarding school as a day student. He went for a week and at its end flatly refused to return. “Sister Margaret is nice but I can learn more from Archy.”
“Aren’t you ever lonely for someone your own age to talk to?” I asked him.
He gave me a look I could only describe as indulgent. “Only one out of those twenty kids is even close to my age and she thinks I’m weird because I came out of a bottle.”
“What?” I said indignantly. “What’s her problem? The little bigot.”
“Ah, Naomi’s just dumb. All she wants to do is stay home and cook and read.” He snorted. “She’s afraid of pressure suits, mostly because she doesn’t understand how they work, and when I tried to explain she looked at me and said, ‘Would you like to share a bran muffin? I made them last night.’ ”
“Where is Naomi’s home, dear?” Mother, who was listening, said.
“Um, Apple Pie, Emaa. Seventy-four twelve, I think.”
Mother nodded to herself. Later she told me, “I’ve been on 7412Apple Pie, dear. Albert and Victoria Hanover. The last time I visited, they had stockpiled enough ore to finance a small revolution in Central America, and had produced enough children to man a football team. He never lifts a finger inside the lock, she never stirs a step outside it. The boys never so much as wash a fork, the girls never lift anything bigger than a cooking pot. All the children are named after Old Testament figures. I’m surprised they allowed Naomi to go to school at all, because after all, dear, you never know what kind of strange ideas children pick up in foreign parts.” When I laughed, Mother said apologetically, “But really, dear, they do seem very happy.”
“Ours is not to reason why.”
“No.” Mother was silent for a little while. “How are things between you and Leif, Esther?”
“Fine.” She looked at me. “Well, they are.”
“He’s trying so hard, dear.”
“So am I,” I said, trying not to sound defensive.
“He’s barely fourteen. You’re forty-four.”
“Forty-five.” I sighed. “Is this going to be one of those oblique Mother-type conversations where I have to chase down blind alleys and up switchbacks for what you really mean?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Esther,” Mother said. “I have to go, I’m meeting Crippen in the galley at five. Good night, dear.”
So Leif reenrolled in the Archy Academy of Higher Education, and Mother continued to take him with her on her various excursions to collect interesting Belt settlements. The three of them seemed content with the arrangement, and I left them to it. By then we were up to our ears in, of all things, an advertising campaign.
We’d always had Helen on our side with the homemades, and Frank was coming along, but it took the two of them some time to convince the Terranova Assembly that Star Svensdotter had not gone completely off her rocker. I found out later Helen dropped some hints about retiring Terranova’s American Alliance indebtedness within the next decade; I’m sure glad I didn’t know about that at the time. In spite of my carefully maintained can-do attitude, the whole project was just too iffy to be tying Terranova’s entire future to it. But then Helen’s nature was not exactly conservative, and the selling of homemades to the Terranova Assembly was no exception.
Unbeknownst to me, innocently and industriously plugging away some 1.8 astronomical units outsystem, Helen had orchestrated a media blitz.
Advertising, according to the dictionary, is a message designed to promote a product, a service, or an idea.
“Which means convincing people to buy something they didn’t know they needed,” Simon said.
“For a price they know they can’t afford,” Charlie said.
On Terra, Luna, and Terranova, advertising had been regulated by the government and by Madison Avenue itself. Restricted to the truth, it lost in power, but the truth had never stopped Helen before and there was no reason to think it would now. Generally speaking, advertising campaigns are designed around ads placed in newspapers, magazines, on the trivee, and through direct and/or mail solicitation. Novelty items such as calendars, matchbooks, key rings, and pens serve to keep the product in mind.
The first thing Helen did was come up with a logo, the outline of a cozy brick cottage with a circle drawn around it and a starburst overlay. Smoke curled from the chimney and there was the suggestion of a lawn. Then she took our half-jesting slogan, A World of Your Own, and translated it into a concrete idea. Remember those little glass balls filled with water and a little house or a little Santa Claus? You’d shake them and they’d fill with swirling snow. There’s a long German name for them that translates as “snow globes” or “snow balls” or something like that. Well, Helen designed one of those, only this one was a graphplex ball with a tiny translucent city in the middle of a dark green forest molded around the inside. Turn it and lights went on in the city and a very blue miniature river circumnavigated the equator. It fit in the palm of one hand.
Helen had the Terranova machine shop make up a couple thousand of them and took one with her to an interview on Time Marches On.
“Helen gave an interview?” Charlie said incredulously.
“That’s what it says.” I reread the relevant passage in the document scrolling up the monitor screen just to be sure.
“Whose idea was that?”
I squinted at the printing. “It says here Helen volunteered.”
Charlie wasn’t convinced. “To give an interview to the press!”
“To a Time trivee newsie.”
“And she volunteered?”
“Read it yourself.”
Charlie took my seat and read the entire article from start to finish. She read it again a second time, just to be sure. When she finished, we sat together in awed silence. “She really believes in this project, Star,” Charlie said finally. “We better make damn sure it works.”
The little graphplex balls became the favorite toy of every child in Terran orbit under the age of seventy-five. In spite of a generous offer from Mattel, Helen refused to sell the patent on them or give them out except as a bonus to the information packet she sent in response to an inquiry about the homemade.
When the first campaign began to run out of steam, Helen designed another snow ball, larger than the last one, that could be taken apart and reassembled, with tiny houses and trees, and came up with a new slogan, World Enough and Time. When that pitch showed signs of slowing down, she hit the market with That Untraveled World and a lilliputian aquarium, and then A World to Win and another aquarium model, this one with live fish. And we had yet to perfect our pahoehoe, or complete our demonstrator, or come up with a solid, workable architectural design for new world housing.
“You know what we need?” I said suddenly.
“What, besides a Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations?” Simon said grumpily.
“We need a Roberta McInerny. She could whip out a plan for a bridge over the river Styx.” I made the suggestion to Helen in the weekly report. Three months later the chunky, no-nonsense figure of Roberta McInerny debarked from a T-LM container ship and sat down at once to design a blueprint for housing that provided forty-five square meters of living area per person, divided inside the sphere into three communities of thirty-five hundred people each. The homes we would build for those settlers who wanted a turnkey contract would include terraced apartments below latitude 45, with a private garden six by ten meters for each residence. An industrial community would have the option of running the villages in separate time zones eight hours apart to provide the world with a twenty-four-hour work force.
A Handful of Stars (Star Svensdotter #2) Page 20
