A Handful of Stars (Star Svensdotter #2)
Page 22
“What?”
“I was afraid I’d forgotten how.”
Caleb’s laughter was deep and reassuring.
At about midnight, he went down to the galley and made dinner: pork roast (out of the meat vats) basted with apple liqueur (brewed in a vacuum still), served with wild rice (grown in Geodome One) and sautéed mushrooms (Geodome Three), and chocolate mousse (from some of the newly harvested cacao beans) for dessert. The fat on the pork was crisp, the vegetables were tender without being mushy, and the mousse was to die for. I love to eat, but if I had to do the cooking, my idea of a tasty, nutritious meal, elegantly prepared and simply served, was a jar of peanut butter with the lid off and a spoon stuck in it. I fell in love with my husband all over again.
· · ·
The next morning we met at the hub airlock. The team was composed of Caleb and me, Ursula Lodge and Kleng Qvist, Leif, who still insisted he was the only one who could talk to the Conestoga crew on their level, and Mother, our only and, I may add, self-proclaimed resident anthropologist. We didn’t bother with a solarsled; this time we powered up the scout, with Crip piloting. Charlie saw us off. Before sealing the hatch she gave me one sharp, all-inclusive glance, transferred her beady little eyes to Caleb and ran a second survey, and allowed herself a knowing smirk. I pulled the hatch to, just missing her nose.
Crip matched hulls with the Conestoga and we latched on to their main airlock. It wouldn’t access.
“Do you want me to force it?” Caleb asked.
We’d been hailing the Conestoga all the way there, with no result. They couldn’t have missed the resounding clang when we locked on. We couldn’t just go down and do what we wanted on Tomorrow; we’d be jumping their claim and violating the most sacrosanct canon of the Belt code. On the other hand, if I gave Caleb the go ahead to break their lock, we’d be violating the second most sacrosanct canon of the Belt code.
But this was just too important to walk away from, and whatever else he was, Lavoliere was a scientist. Once I explained, I was sure he would understand the urgency. I gave a reluctant nod. “Do it.”
It took him about two minutes. The hatch gave and we swarmed inside. They were waiting for us. It wasn’t coffee and cookies this time, or lunch. It wasn’t a laser pistol or a sonic rifle designed to kill without piercing the hull, either. “What is that?” I said to Caleb out of the side of my mouth.
“AK-47,” he replied the same way. “The Kalashnikov. Won the War of Independence in Vietnam. Semiautomatic model. Big clip.”
“What’s a clip?”
“Rounds. Bullets.”
“Bullets?” My voice went up high and cracked. “How many?”
He squinted. “That one holds thirty.”
“Oh.” I swallowed. I had to ask.
What this meant to me was that the rifle, held none too steadily by an obviously terrified but equally determined Lavoliere, fired material projectiles. After the load went through me, chances were it would go through the hull, and that meant that if I didn’t bleed to death, I’d be finished off in the explosive decompression immediately following. I suddenly found it very hard to breathe. “You shoot that thing in here, Lavoliere,” I said, “you’ll compromise the integrity of your seal. Put it down.”
“Why should I?” Lavoliere said, his voice shaking as much as his hands. “You’re going to kill us all anyway.” The muzzle of the rifle jerked up and down and swung back and forth. That section of my chest toward which the muzzle of his weapon seemed to be pointing the most often felt very cold. Behind him what looked like the entire crew complement of the Conestoga was jammed into the passageways leading into the room, straining to watch us without putting themselves into the line of possible fire. He waved them back and hooked his toes more securely into footslings to steady his aim.
“Lavoliere,” I said, trying to make myself sound calm and rational, not an easy thing to do when staring down the maw of a twentieth-century antique, “I give you my word. I have no intention of harming anyone aboard this ship or the ship itself, I just want—”
Lavoliere actually cocked the damn thing. Somebody yelled and I was almost knocked loose from my handhold. It was Ursula, who kicked off the hatch and caromed into Lavoliere. Something cracked. Someone screamed. Something cracked again. I heard an ominous hissing noise. I’d heard it before, and it scared me as much as it always did. “Pressure leak!” I shouted. “All hands, emergency stations!”
One of the Eves kicked her way into the room. Her eyes were wide and terrified but she swam and pulled and fought her way to the opposite bulkhead and a red locker I hadn’t seen before. I caught on and went after her. I got there just as she popped the locker and pulled out the sealant kit. Bodies were jamming themselves back up the passageways in a frenzied rush and zerogee didn’t stop them from hurting one another as they clawed themselves as far away as possible. All the better.
Then Eve and I pushed off for the center of the lock. She pulled out the flambeau. Her eyes still wide and fearful, she looked at me. I nodded. She ignited it. There was no fire, only a cloud of smoke, thick and bright yellow. I watched the smoke. It eddied around in the center of the room for a bit. Then it began to swirl, slowly at first, and then more rapidly. I followed it down to the hole in the bulkhead. It wasn’t much, maybe three centimeters across, but it was whistling like the gypsy rover. I beckoned the Eve down and we had it patched in sixty seconds.
I looked up. The bright yellow cloud was slowing now, its remnants dispersing gently into comers. “Dammit, where’s the other one?” I said. “He shot twice, he hit something. Where is it?” Something brushed against my cheek and I swiped at it impatiently. I looked at my glove. It was stained red.
Startled, I looked up. There were other globules, floating around me, intermingled with wisps of yellow fog.
“Can you imagine, Caleb,” Lodge was saying, “arming yourself with a weapon that fires solid projectiles, in vacuum?” She’d finally managed to wrest the rifle out of Lavoliere’s hands and was emptying the chamber. “Nuts. Plain, ordinary, everyday nuts.”
There was a kind of a horrible gurgle, right behind me. She looked up, and all the color left her face.
I knew at once. I knew before I turned. I knew before I looked. I knew before I touched. I knew.
Caleb was directly behind me. He had removed his helmet when we entered, so I could clearly see the gaping wound in his throat, the deep red venous blood pumping slowly out of his cruelly torn dark skin.
He was looking at me, straight at me.
He spoke.
“Star—” he said.
“Love—” he said.
Then that horrible gurgling sound again.
He tried to smile. The blood bubbled out from between his lips, broke away to join the other precious droplets, drifting, floating, wandering about the room, away from him.
He seemed to reach out to me with his enormous gloved hands, gloves, like mine, stained red, stained with the vain effort of holding himself together, of clutching to consciousness, to being, to existence. To me.
And then he stopped smiling. His hands stopped reaching. And the life drained out of his green eyes.
· · ·
Someone else tore Caleb’s laser pistol out of its holster. Someone else kicked Lodge in the chest when she tried to get it back. Someone else paused momentarily when a blond, blue-eyed kid latched on to her arm with arms, legs, and teeth. Someone else shrugged the kid off, backhanding him across the face in the same movement. Someone else shook Mother off their back like an annoying mosquito, someone else elbowed Crip in the groin and left him doubled up, gray-faced and gasping. Someone else sighted down that long, long barrel, to line up the terrified face of the Conestoga’s leader in the twin sights. Someone else waited for him to break. Someone else waited for him to beg. Someone else waited for him to cry, and sob, and plead.
And then someone else squeezed the trigger. Someone else kept on squeezing that trigger, squeezing it and squeezing it and squeezing it a
nd squeezing it, until long after the batpak ran out, until long after Lavoliere was nothing but a shapeless mass of charred material and crisping flesh.
· · ·
Claire and her crew were on Tomorrow like flies on a dog. They quartered and subdivided and sectioned. They mapped every crack longer than a toothpick and they measured every crevice thicker than a dime. Parvati putted up in the thump truck and set off a series of seismic booms, recording the resulting sonic resonances on squares of limnofax she laid over Tomorrow’s topographical map. And then they got out the Kepler-TT optic cannons. The samples came out of the surface in perfect tubes ten centimeters in diameter and ten meters in length. Parvati and every jackleg geologist Claire could conscript or commandeer went to work dissecting them.
It took every man, woman, and child Outpost could spare, working three weeks of twenty-five-hour days. At the end of that time Claire went into a huddle with her team and didn’t come up for air for three more days, at which time she sent out for a geochemist and someone trained in time-lapse geophysical analysis.
The following Monday. D day. Claire had us assemble in the galley. Everyone came who could fit. Leif, his bruised and swollen face beginning to return to normal, kept close to Mother. He wouldn’t look at me.
“Before y’all like to jump down my throat, it’s oil all right,” Claire said, or I thought that was what she said. Her accent was so thick that morning that it was difficult to understand her words. “Crude. Black gold. Raghead blood. Dinosaur piss. Call it what y’all want, it’s oil. Anybody who says different don’t got the sense to pour piss out a boot without directions printed on the heel. And yes, it’s indigenous to 7877Tomorrow. That rock is about as thick with oil as Atlanta was carpetbaggers after the War.”
Her brown eyes held a hard glitter and she had a set grin fixed to her mouth that looked part snarl. Her team was clustered behind her, tense with suppressed excitement. “What else?” I said, because there obviously was something else.
She drew herself up to her full height. “They should have called it Yesterday.” We all looked puzzled, and she said, “7877Tomorrow. They should have called it 7877Yesterday. This stuff didn’t grow there. It was put.”
“ ‘It was put’? What does that mean, ‘it was put’?”
Claire leaned forward with her hands flat on the table and said deliberately, “I am saying that 7877Tomorrow was once part of a larger celestial body whose inhabitants used refined petrochemical products in large quantities and stored them against that use.”
We sat there like dummies, gaping at Claire.
She nodded. She appeared to be enjoying herself hugely. “It’s an artificial reservoir,” she said. And she added, “Or I should say, it was.”
Mother gave a soft, queer little sigh. Charlie said flatly, “This is a joke, right, Claire?”
· · ·
The last thing I’d thought we’d be needing in the Belt was a paleontologist, or an archaeologist.
Or an archaeoastronomist. We needed someone up in the study of the astronomy of ancient peoples. From minute traces of an organism that looked like a bald paramecium, Charlie and Claire dated our find, or the destruction of it, as being twenty-six hundred years old. Whatever petroleum-producing, petroleum-storing intelligence was present in Belt orbit at 600 B.C. must have gone up with one hell of a bang to leave nothing but barren rocks behind; it had to have been noticed on Terra. After some wild speculation and a lot of one-shot, dingdong hypothesizing, Sam Holbrook finally said it, tentatively, maybe even a little fearfully. “There used to be a planet here.” When no one contradicted him, he got braver. “Maybe more than one? There are four major clusters of planetismals in the Belt. Perhaps there were four planets orbiting in the same plane.”
The room was silent while that sank in, and then Simon gave voice to the other thought preeminent in our minds. “What happened to them?”
Sam looked over at him. “Do you really want to know?”
There are almost as many theories about the formation of the minor planets as there are minor planets. The original theory was in fact that a planet broke up, with four variations on the major theme: 1) that the breakup was caused by an explosion, origin unknown; 2) that a too-rapid rotation caused a deterioration and eventual disintegration; 3) that a tidal disruption did same; 4) that a collision between two planets did same.
Later, telescopic studies advanced the notion that the planetismals developed along with the rest of the solar system from a swirling nebula of gas and dust that gradually agglomerated into larger and larger bodies, and the single-planet breakup theory went out the window. “Some astronomers,” Sam said, “speculate that Chiron was once an asteroid, others consider the Trojans to be lost satellites of Jupiter and not asteroids at all.”
“Phobos and Deimos look like asteroids,” someone said.
“And Io, Europa, Ganymede, and the rest of Jupiter’s satellites could have been asteroids transformed into moons by Jupiter’s gravitational pull,” Sam said, nodding.
“This is all very interesting but it doesn’t get us any forrader,” Simon said. “What happened to whatever was here?”
“And how?”
“And why?” Mother said softly.
“For now, we’d better concentrate on what. Look, that big a bang this nearby must have registered with someone on Terra. All I can remember about celestial explosions from my astronomy course is the Crab Nebula.”
“Recorded by Tycho Brahe in 1572,” Parvati said, nodding her head.
“Recorded by him in 1572, yes,” Sam said, “it exploded in 1054. Brahe was one of the first astronomers with the guts to put down in writing what was really happening overhead.”
“The Crab Nebula was visible in broad daylight, wasn’t it?”
He nodded again.
“We need something like that, only about two thousand years previous,” Claire said.
Sam got up. “I’ll have Maile send off a priority message to Maria Mitchell,” he said. “Their database has all the old records, including the first Chinese sightings of Comet Halley, collated and filed on disk. If anyone has a record of an astronomical event the size we’re looking for, Tori will.”
“Good. We could use some kind of independent confirmation of what we’ve found here.”
“How could it have been so totally lost to us?” Mother wondered aloud. “What happened to them? What happened?”
We were all frightened, and uneasy with it. Where there might have been a world, and people like us on it, now there was none. It reminded us of the near chaos on Terra. There wasn’t one of us over twelve who hadn’t been born on Terra. It didn’t bear thinking of.
“Six hundred B.C.,” Maggie Lu said thoughtfully. “Lao Tzu.”
“Lao Tzu?” Charlie said. “What’s that?”
“It’s a he. He taught around 600 B.C. He instructed that harmony was with the unseen, and with nature. Tao, the way, and te, the power.”
There was a brief silence. “Maggie, is there something you’re trying to tell us?”
“And Confucius,” she said, ignoring Charlie. “He was born in 551 B.C.”
“And what did he preach?”
“He didn’t preach, he taught. He never posed as a prophet or a messenger of God.”
“Okay, what’d he teach?”
“That to love men is jen, the essence of humanity, the universal moral force.”
“Maggie—”
“The pharaoh Necho,” Akhenaton Sadat, a Star Guard, said. “It was about 600 B.C. he ordered Africa to be circumnavigated, wasn’t it?”
“Zoroaster in Persia,” said Sayyid Kajar, one of Claire’s geologists. “He founded the first monotheistic religion on Terra, one with a dual force. Ahura Mazda, the force for good, and Ahriman, the force for evil.”
“The Jewish prophets in Israel,” Ari Greenbaum chimed in.
“And Siddhartha Gautama,” Parvati Gandhi said. “Born on Terra about 600 B.C. or so. So it is written.”
“Do you know what Siddhartha means?” Parvati said.
Arrested, Simon said slowly, “No. What?”
“It means ‘goal reached.’ ”
There was silence in the galley for a long time.
Simon stirred. “I see where you’re heading with this, and I will acknowledge that there is room for speculation, but—”
Mother said firmly, “We must stop shipping asteroids to Terranova, dear. We must stop excavating rocks and start mapping them, inside and out, instead. We must stop as many miners as we can from exploiting their claims any further until each has been examined for artifacts.”
“I knew it,” Charlie said fatalistically.
“What!” Maggie said.
Charlie looked at Simon and added, “I warned you what would happen if you found out that anything higher on the food chain than a plankton made that crude.”
Simon looked at Mother and said, “Natasha, you are out of your mind.”
“We dare not risk the destruction of further evidence of the existence of life in the Belt,” Mother reiterated.
Crip said crisply, “And what happens to the Terranovan ore shipment schedule? To the Homemade construction timetable?”
“And what if we do shut down operations?” someone else said. “I for one did not come all the way out to the Belt to sit around twiddling my thumbs.”
“Nor I!”
“Me either!”
“Do you wish,” Mother said calmly, “to be known as the people responsible for erasing what may be part of the prologue to human history?”
“Now wait just a goddam minute.” I looked around. Maile was on her feet and without the trace of a smile on her face. “We’re talking abut a history that may or may not have existed, three thousand years ago, on the strength of one small puddle of crude and the remains of what may or may not have been its container.”