A Handful of Stars (Star Svensdotter #2)

by Dana Stabenow

  The rest of us barely had time to catch our breath when Roberta plunged into plans for what she called her playpen design, which included half a dozen luxury hotels, two convention centers, a casino, a dog track, and, the pièce de résistance, a horse racing track. She called this potential world’s three villages Kentucky, Belmont, and Preakness, and named the world itself Triple Crown. The only thing Roberta actively disliked about spacing was the distance it put between her and her father’s bluegrass breeding ranch in Kentucky.

  And lo and behold, Helen’s advertising campaigns began to generate interest, a lot of it. She started feeding us inquiries. I set Mother and Leif to sifting through the applications. The first thing we did, as per Archy’s astute suggestion, was to check out their credit rating. We weren’t looking for a group able to pay cash on the barrel head for an entire new world. Except maybe for the New Mafia and a few trivee evangelists, we weren’t expecting anyone to have that kind of cash in a lump sum ready to hand, so we tried to tailor a payment program to suit individual needs. A group of engineers and technicians with specialties in vacuum construction, say, would come out to the Belt in advance and work on their world and others to reduce their debt with man hours. A group specializing in medical research might pay off their balance due in zerogee pharmaceuticals, a group of farmers in produce, a computech world in zerogee-grown gallium arsenide crystals for superchips. We encouraged everyone to think in terms of paying their way, of identifying a market they could supply prior to the decision to resettle, and then adapting the design of their world around that specific industry. We weeded out a lot of wishful thinkers, in particular one man who said he was the head of the IRA in Northern Ireland. Upon further investigation, we found that he wasn’t looking for himself but for the Protestant Northern Irish opposition.

  “Certainly that would be one way of solving the Troubles once and for all,” Whitney Burkette commented. “What did he suggest we use for a model? Dante’s Inferno?’

  The International Olympic Committee, tired every four years of trying to find a location for the Games that didn’t mortally offend ten or twelve Terran nations and threaten a continent’s worth of boycotts, inquired as to our snow- and ice-building capabilities. “Maybe they’d let you carry in the torch,” Leif said, reading their letter over my shoulder. “It’s always a local athlete who does it. Or maybe you could compete again.”

  “Zerogee events,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “They’re flying in the Bats’ Cave on Luna and off Wilbur and Orville in Terranova.”

  A cartoon cockroach appeared on the monitor in place of scrolled text and Leif said indignantly, “Hey!”

  The cockroach shoved his derby to the back of his head and shifted his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. Simon had decided Archy needed a visage and had taken unilateral action in the matter. “New events, you mean?”

  “A whole new category of Games. Flying, zerogee gymnastics.” I waggled my eyebrows. “Skating.”

  “Impractical for swimming.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” I said slowly, envisioning an enormous globe of water floating in the center of one of our worlds. “But we could expand basketball to tridee the way we do in the Hub. And if the Olympic Committee won’t play we simply start our own Games.”

  “I like it.”

  “Archy?”

  “I’m way ahead of you, Star. I’ve already sent a message to Helen to find out what the trivee rights for the last Olympics went for.”

  The United Nations, nudged into it by an American Alliance irritated by sixty years of fifty percent of the UN budget coming out of their national deficit, put out a tentative feeler. And then Disney wrote, rhapsodizing over the possibilities of a low or zerogee Adventureworld, and we knew we were home free.

  Now all we had to do was live up to our advance billing.

  — 9 —

  Ghosts

  The breezes have nothing to remember and everything to promise. There walk, as yet, no ghosts of lovers in Canadian lanes… It is possible, at a pinch, to do without gods. But one misses the dead.

  —Rupert Brooke

  IT TOOK US A LONG TIME to find the right rock for the first new world. What with the prospective success of the aquarium after the axial passageways were designed, and Helen hounding us, and inquiries bombarding us nonstop from Terran orbit, we didn’t want to mess around with a time-consuming orbit correction. Our first new world had to have a reasonably circular and noneccentric path. The orbital velocity had to be comparable to that of the station, or slow enough to be correctable without vaporizing the entire rock. Its diameter, to meet the one-hundred-meter finished design prerequisite, had to be of the proper size and density. It had to have a high concentration of the right elements and a low concentration of the wrong ones, in particular anything that might after prolonged exposure cause a human being to glow in the dark. It had to be close enough to Outpost not to eat up too much travel time for the construction crews to get there and back, but it had to be far enough away to be as yet unexploited by Belt prospectors.

  With fifty-thousand-plus asteroids to choose from, even within those parameters, we did not think the search would take as long as it did. But it was over a year from the time we first put the plan in motion before Caleb, registering a new claim for the Star Guard patrol on the fringe of the No More Gold Cluster, eventually stumbled across the perfect rolling stone.

  He almost missed it when he turned aside to arbitrate an arms race between 8687Boomerang and 8688Lone Star. It seemed the Aussies had stolen an optic cannon from the Texans, who had retaliated by stealing an ore dredge. Next, a core sampler disappeared from Boomerang, followed by a centrifuge separator from Lone Star, a case of nobelite from Boomerang, and a gravity feeder from Lone Star. The thefts continued. The Aussies went out and bought laser pistols. The Texans sprouted scatterguns. The Aussies mined a kilogram or so of plutonium and built a primitive but functional nuclear device, at which time one Aussie, Missy Gulagong, had the good sense to yell for help. Caleb took one look at the setup and yelled for help of his own. Guards Jo-jo Kennedy and Eloise Rothschild responded, and nobody died, or at least not of radiation poisoning.

  Caleb went on to register the new claim with the Star Guard, and on the way home came across this rock. Claire sent Parvati Gandhi out to make an assay and it proved up to the tune of fourteen percent oxygen and enough nitrogen to keep the airtechs giggling for years, and no prior claim beacons.

  Best of all, 12047Peggie Sue, so christened by Claire, was moving at a speed and trajectory that with a gentle nudge and three months time would bring it virtually alongside Outpost, a mere three million meters off our portside, between us and Sol.

  In the meantime, Claire and her geologists were sorting through the mass of samples brought on board Outpost for classification and cataloguing, and then the Belt’s miners got in on the act. We hadn’t made any secret of our plans and they were more than happy to trot core samples and albedo snakes and seismic readings of every real and imagined rock they had ever stumbled across, for a small fee in the form of Kona Premium or a picnic in Central Park or a tape out of the library. There were cylinders of core samples everywhere, lining the passageways, piled up in the galley, and the neatly tied paper rolls of snakes and spectroscopic readings threatened to choke Claire out of the office she maintained in her cabin. She took to sleeping in Perry’s cabin, until Perry made it clear that three was a crowd.

  “What?” I said. “Nobody tells me anything. Who?”

  “One of the Smiths.”

  “Which one?”

  Claire scratched her head. “No one’s been able to tell.”

  I thought about it, feeling more than a little awed. “With Perry, and given the Guard’s rotation schedule, I suppose it could be all three.”

  She nodded sagely. “This is true.”

  The twins and Alexei were playing in the galley. One twin, I was pretty sure it was Paddy, had a construction paper
feather stuck in a band round her forehead and was being staunchly if shakily withstood by the boys from behind a core sample stockade. She let out a bloodcurdling whoop the likes of which would have struck fear into the heart of Daniel Boone and made a running assault against the front of the stockade. It came crashing down and rolled in seven different directions across the galley, knocking down two agrotechs and one stray miner in search of ice cream. In the halfgee bodies and rock sections alike bounced pretty well.

  Paddy made triumphant preparations to burn her prisoners at the stake, at which prospect the younger settler began to cry. “This is not the way the West was won, kids,” I said, coming up behind them. I picked up Alexei and sat down with him on my lap. “Yuk. What on earth have you been into?”

  The kid was covered with a black, sticky mess that at a distance I had at first mistaken for chocolate, the cacao beans having been harvested from Geodome Three the past month, with a subsequently very heavy run on milk, ice cream, cake, and cookies.

  Close up, the stuff did not look like chocolate. It was too thin and greasy. I touched one finger to the mess and sniffed. “Phew!” I said. “I haven’t smelled anything this bad since—” I stopped. I held my hand back up to my face and inhaled deeply. I looked very hard at the three of them. Sean and Paddy stared solemnly back, unafraid, but my nephew looked as if he might burst into tears again. “It’s all right, sweetheart,” I said, gathering him into my arms. More of the black slippery stuff came off on my hands. I touched my tongue to my palm. The taste was acrid, bitter.

  I reached out one arm and snagged a twin. “Where did this stuff come from?”

  The three of them froze and looked at me out of wide, innocent eyes. “What stuff?”

  “Don’t give me that,” I said, giving the one twin I had a gentle shake. The other took a few prudent steps out of reach. “This black stuff you’ve got all over you. Where did you get into it? Have you been messing around in the fab shops again?”

  Paddy said in a very small voice, “Promise you won’t get mad?”

  “I promise.”

  “Okay, Mommy,” she said. Sean walked over to a table shoved against one wall, and disappeared beneath it. I heard some scrabbling around, and then he reappeared with several sections of a core sample fractured into several pieces. He brought them across the galley and deposited them on the floor at my feet with the unequivocal air of one taking no further responsibility.

  I sat Alexei down on the bench beside me and picked one up. The exterior was smooth from the optic driller but the interior was rough and almost sandy. It oozed a viscous black substance that smelled distinctly of sulfur.

  “My God,” I said.

  “What, Mommy? What’s the matter?”

  “Auntie mad,” Alexei said in a gloomy voice.

  “This is crude,” I said, not quite believing it even after I’d said the words out loud.

  “What is what?” Simon said, coming up behind me.

  “This is crude,” I said in a louder voice, and shoved one of my dirty palms under his nose.

  He drew back, wrinkling his nose. “Gak! What is that stuff?”

  “It’s crude, you dimwit.” He continued looking blank. “Crude oil, Simon. Dinosaur piss. Petroleum.”

  He stared from my smeared black palm to me and back again. “Do you mean—petrochemicals? Hydrocarbons?”

  “Yes, that’s what I mean!”

  “Well, that’s all very interesting, of course, but—”

  “Simon, you ass, wake up! The presence of hydrocarbons in this form presupposes the existence of organic life in the Belt!”

  · · ·

  The organic theory of petroleum and natural gas—on Terra—has it that the substance was formed from the remains of tiny marine plants and animals that died millions of years ago. Sedimentary rock subjected the remains to great pressure that over several million years broke the substance down into hydrocarbons, which formed pools to be tapped several million years after that by the human race, to be used for everything from making plastic to manufacturing smog. That was no tiger in your tank, that was Tyrannosaurus rex.

  There was no, and had never been, organic life in the Belt. Therefore the stuff smearing all over the five of us and the galley could not possibly be crude oil. Simon had just finished explaining this to me when Parvati came in. “I could hear you yelling all the way down to Central Park,” she said. “What’s going on?” I seized on her with both filthy hands. “Hey! Watch what you’re doing!”

  “Parvati, you’re a geologist, right?”

  She looked at me suspiciously. “What is this, a trick question? You know I am.”

  “Look at this stuff.”

  “This stuff you’ve just rubbed all over my clean jumpsuit?”

  “Yes. What do you think it is?”

  Parvati, a slender, dark-haired woman with a round caste mark between strongly marked brows, rubbed the greasy mess between her fingers and sniffed at it distastefully.

  “Well? Well?” I fairly danced around her in my impatience. “What do you think it is?”

  She sniffed at her fingers again, and her heavy brows snapped together.

  “Well?” I demanded.

  She shook her head decisively. “It’s just not possible, not here. Where’s the sample it came from?”

  Alexei and the twins displayed the broken pieces mutely. Parvati’s mouth went down at the corners. She got down on her knees to manhandle the pieces of cylinder until she found a number chalked on a side. She switched on her communit. “Gandhi here, log Pliny.”

  “Pliny on.”

  “Access planetismal catalogue.”

  “Accessed,” the flat monotone said. Geologists never seem to get the hang of personalizing their computer programs.

  “Identification by sample number.” Parvati read the chalked number off the side of the core sample.

  “Working,” Pliny said. “That number corresponds to planetismal numbered 7877, Outpost catalogue August 1, 2011, confirmed Star Guard catalogue confirmation and update September 5, 2011.”

  “Location.”

  “Working. Out of plane, eleven percent. Out of ecliptic, nine-point-four percent. On my mark, sixteen hundred hours, twenty-three minutes Outpost standard time, January 17, 2012, location of 7877 is twenty-one degrees, twelve minutes ex Outpost heading 095, accelerating four-point-zero-two-three-two kilometers per second relative to Outpost orbit. Mark. Do you wish to compute an approach?”

  “Negative. Pliny log off,” Parvati said, and looked over at me.

  “7877?” I said, bouncing up and down on my toes. “Which one’s that?”

  “7877Tomorrow,” she said. “The Conestoga claim.”

  · · ·

  “No,” Caleb said. I think it was maybe the tenth time he had addressed me directly in the four and a half months since we’d come back from vacation.

  “Caleb, I—”

  “You are not going back there,” he stated.

  It is a sad but indisputable fact that whenever someone tells me flatly that I can’t do something that I immediately decide I can and will. I could feel the slow burn coming on. “I was not aware,” I stated, “that the activities of the Terranova Expedition leader came beneath the authority of the Terranova Expedition’s security chief.”

  It is also a sad but indisputable fact that the madder I am, the more pompous I get.

  “Besides,” I added nastily, “it was my impression that you gave not one single, solitary damn who I saw or what I did or where I went—”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “—and if you think that after almost five months of the silent treatment you can—”

  “Star, I’ve been about ten different kinds of a jerk.”

  “—just waltz in and tell me—”

  “Maybe more.”

  “—what I can do and where I can go—what did you say?”

  “I am an idiot,” he said.

  I did not disagree.

 
; “I stopped being mad at you a long time ago.”

  “You couldn’t prove it by me,” I said, still smarting. I was ready for a fight. I didn’t want to stop yelling. I wanted him to yell back at me. I wanted to throw things. I didn’t care that half my section heads and all of my family were standing around watching. I wanted to draw blood, and not mine.

  “Star,” he said, and his voice went all black velvet and brown sugar on me. I stiffened my spine. “I am sorry, God I’m sorry. I am one sorry son of a bitch. I’ve never behaved like that before in my life.” He swung away, running one hand through his hair. “I’ve never had kids before. It changes things. It changes everything.”

  He glanced at me, and away. “After I was done with wanting to blow the Conestoga out of the Belt, I took my mad out on you, because you were entirely right. We all came here to be able to mind our own business. They have their lives to live, and we have ours.” He paused, and looked at me steadily out of those clear green eyes. “I made you pull rank on me. I’ve never behaved like that before in my life,” he repeated. “It’s taken me this long to forgive myself, not you.”

  When Caleb apologized, he did so comprehensively and with style. “Caleb—”

  “You’re still not going to the Conestoga,” he said calmly.

  “What! Why, you—”

  “Alone.”

  There was a lot of silence in our cabin.

  “Or tonight,” he added, and reached behind me to open the door. He stood there, holding it open, and waited.

  Crip stirred. “Natasha?” he said to Mother.

  “Yes, dear,” she said, and they left our cabin. Simon and Charlie followed with Alexei. Leif scooped up the twins. In fifteen seconds we were completely alone.

  “Thank God,” I said devoutly, a while later.