Second Star (Star Svensdotter #1) Read online

  “Her again.”

  “Yeah, Pran was livid. He said he’d never met anyone who thought with her crotch before—only he didn’t say crotch—and if someone had asked him he’d have forgone the privilege, thank you very much.”

  “How did you find?”

  “Why don’t you have Archy call up Orestes and read it for yourself? Torkelson and Lachailles wanted to fight a duel. Yes, really, a duel. I told them they could fight it out in the nearest airlock but that they had better settle it quick because in sixty seconds I would blow the lock.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah. I was mad. Things calmed down after that. I broke Nesbitt from foreman to tech third class on the charge of inciting to riot, and split Torkelson and Lachailles up between Valley Two and Valley Three plants. Archy told me to spit on my hands and get out the cat-o’-nine-tails. Which reminds me, Simon, about Archy—”

  “—and even if they live they can’t eat—”

  “Unusual activity? Oh, yes, Area 378. Star was asking about it. No, it’s more like a controlled burn than a flare. Remarkably steady, actually; there is hardly any fluctuation in proton emissions in Area 378 at all. Very odd in solar atmospherics. Lord, when I think of all that energy going to waste! Passive solar power is all very well—”

  “—do realize who we’re talking about here? Zoya Yelena Bugolubovo? Author of ‘On the Hydroponic Propagation of Food Grains in Zero Gravity’ ”? The first Terran agronomist in space?”

  “Isn’t she married to the Vitaly Viskov who won the Nobel Prize for his experiments with silicon polymers?”

  “Who?”

  “—and even if they eat they can’t fly—”

  “—and then the goddam shuttle hull starts to glow—”

  “Do you want to hear about freedom of the press, Star?”

  “No,” I said plaintively.

  “I’ll tell you about freedom of the press, Star, as we knew it—all two days of it—and loved it in my hometown of Buenos Aires—”

  “What do you think they’d been doing up there for twelve months at a whack, studying the military applications of tiddlywinks in zero gravity? They were planning how to survive a seventy-eight-million kilometer voyage in a weightless environment. Every time they went up they plugged part of their ship into their orbiting laboratory and left it there. They even had a couple hundred kids age ten and up living in a cosmonaut city, training to live and work in space. They were going to Mars all right, and the even money said they were on their way before 2000.” Crip snorted. “They beat that by four years. And we were stuck with a space truck that couldn’t make it past low earth orbit and half the time couldn’t even get off the goddam ground, and when it did—” Crip broke off, but we all knew he was thinking of Challenger and Challenger II.

  “So, what are we saying here? That the Soviets—all right, all right, the UER, but by God once a Russian always a Russian—you’re saying the Russians put us where we are today?”

  “Russians, hell! The Russians were broke, even broker than us. We didn’t need another Red scare, we needed a—a sixties’ sense of mission, or at least that same kind of clarity of purpose. What we really needed was a cause, like Sputnik. We needed an Oregon Trail to the stars.”

  “And we couldn’t find one ourselves?”

  Crip, drink forgotten in one hand and well away on his favorite hobbyhorse, said, “The Oregon Trail offered the excitement and adventure of exploring and colonizing an unknown. Whereas the Terran scientific community was a little too clever for our own good from about 1950 on. Venera, Viking, Voyager, Vega, they were all far too reliable and efficient. The average citizen of the 1980s knew more about Chryse on Mars than did the average American pioneer about the Mojave in California. The bottom line is, both Chryse and the Mojave are deserts. So we all knew beyond any doubt that there weren’t any move-overs on Venus or any thoats on Barsoom and a lot of the romance went out of the solar system. And what is exploring a new frontier, without romance?”

  There was a brief silence, which Paddy broke. “What was it Mark Twain was after writing about the Mississippi? When it was a riverboat pilot he became? ‘Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river…’.”

  “ ‘All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat,’ Caleb finished up, smiling at her. The African sibilants following hard on the heels of the Irish brogue sounded very strange, but strangely right. I wished Caleb would stop surprising me.

  “So, what you’re saying, Crip, is that we needed the Beetlejuice Message to provide an impetus to space.”

  “Yes, that is what I am saying. And we’re damn lucky we got it, because you and I would still be flatlanders if we hadn’t.”

  Tori Agoot waved a dismissive hand. “One lousy message and not one word since.”

  “Caleb O’Hara, Tori Agoot, star gazer over at Mitchell.”

  “Glad to meet you, Caleb. Personally I think that linguist Sartre married has him seeing messages in his Cheerios. And the time factor—”

  “It’s stopping right there you’ll be,” Paddy said firmly. “Talk of wormholes is one thing I’ll not be putting up with after dinner. It’s dizzy thinking about time travel always makes me. Talking about it makes me fair seasick.”

  “You don’t believe in E.T., Tori?” Crip said. “Shame on you. Next you’ll be saying there are no Vulcans.”

  “Personally, I chose spacing because I hoped I’d meet a Wookiee out here someday,” Ariadne added, grinning. She held out a hand to Caleb. “Ariadne Papadopoulos. I do all the work at Mitchell while Tori takes the credit.”

  “I think it is reasonable to believe that intelligent life might, I say might exist on other planets,” Tori said obstinately, “but simply believing don’t necessarily make it so.”

  “I’d settle for intelligent life on Terra,” I said, and everyone laughed politely at the very old joke. Old and still my favorite.

  “That’s not the point,” Crip said to Tori. “Because we haven’t seen them doesn’t mean they don’t exist. The point is that I don’t know for sure that there are no little green men or bug-eyed monsters. I haven’t visited every single planet orbiting every single star in every single galaxy in this universe. And since such a voyage is probably impossible—”

  “Probably!” said several voices at once.

  “For now,” Crip said. “For the foreseeable future. Someday, though. Someday.” He and Ariadne got these faraway looks in their eyes, as if they were computing parsecs per ECFCPCs.

  Elizabeth sat on the floor, leaning against my knee, her eyes bright with interest. You know, Tori, she said, two thousand years ago a lot of people who sounded like you went around saying, “The earth is flat!”

  “Show me,” Charlie said simply, unexpectedly entering the lists.

  “We can’t,” Simon replied, naturally coming out for the opposing side.

  “Until you show me, I won’t believe.”

  “If more people thought like you, a lot of priests would be out of business,” Simon said gently.

  “What a pity they don’t,” I said.

  “The devil you say!” Paddy exclaimed.

  “No, Paddy, priests,” Charlie said impatiently. “Pay attention.” She looked at Simon. “There had to be a beginning to the universe. What if we are it?”

  There was a slight pause while we all looked at Simon expectantly. Crip excited, Charlie intent, Caleb amused, Paddy red-faced and holding back a belly laugh. Tori a little scornful of the whole subject, and the rest of us waiting for Simon to light the match and the fireworks to begin. Simon gave a rueful grin. He was more at
home in binary than in System English, but tonight he wasn’t being given a choice.

  Simon was difficult, demanding, brilliant, mercenary, curious, judgmental, and ruthless, and he had more hair than a sheepdog. For the first year I knew him I wasn’t sure he had eyes. He cut his hair for the wedding and they turned out to be dark and sad, over a long, slightly hooked nose and a chin like a shovel in perpetual need of a shave. He used a standard depilatory and carried a razor with him at all times and Charlie still had whisker burns every morning. He had long, thin, hairy arms and longer, thinner, hairier legs, and his skin was pale, as if he spent all his time in a frame room pulling data cards, which he did. When he wasn’t defending Columbian philosophy, that is. He had a voice like Big Ben when by all rights he should have sounded like Daffy Duck. “My vote is for the care and feeding of the human spirit. A belief in extraterrestrial intelligence—”

  We are extraterrestrials, Elizabeth stated.

  Everyone chuckled and Simon said, “You’re quite right, Elizabeth, although from the level displayed here this evening we could call extraterrestrial intelligence as we know it a contradiction in terms.” Charlie flushed and her eyes began to sparkle. “But for the purposes of this argument,” Simon went on smoothly, “will you allow extraterrestrial intelligence to be limited to what does not originate on Terra?”

  Elizabeth gave her father’s suggestion careful consideration, and nodded once, decisively.

  “Thank you. To continue. Imagination and curiosity are two of the greatest human motivators. For example, the META project, even if we had never intercepted the message from Betelgeuse, was and is a worthwhile project, because it is right and proper for the human race to keep looking into our universe, even if we don’t quite know what for.”

  “ ‘I would rather be ashes than dust,’ ” Crip quoted. “ ‘The proper function of man is to live, not exist.’ ”

  “Exactly. We wouldn’t be having this discussion sitting in a space habitat four hundred thousand kilometers from the old home place if the human race had been resting on the laurels of what they knew, say, a thousand years ago. We couldn’t. We have to follow our noses. It’s a genetic imperative.”

  “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in our double helixes,” I declaimed in sepulchral tones.

  “Nature or nurture?” Charlie said thoughtfully.

  “Oh, my God,” Simon said, casting up his eyes, “don’t let her get started on genetic engineering, please.”

  Charlie stiffened, her very hair seemed to crackle with outrage, and a lot of people rushed into nervous speech. Petra shouted the rest of us down. “Simon, I was going to ask you if you were working on Archy this afternoon. I got a blip in the readout of Hewie Seven and I couldn’t track it down.”

  “That’s odd,” Roger said, looking up. “I was accessing Demeter this afternoon and I noticed a hesitation in the data readout myself.”

  “Hey, that happened to Blackwell, too,” Charlie said, momentarily diverted from battle.

  “What time?” Caleb and I said with one voice. Elizabeth was leaning forward with wide, inquiring eyes.

  “Around eighteen hundred,” Petra said, her brow wrinkling as she looked from me to Caleb and back again.

  We looked at Roger. “About then,” he confirmed, and Charlie nodded.

  “What’s going on?” Simon said with a frown, and we said, again with a single voice, “Nothing.” We were getting a lot of odd looks. “Did you get the message I left in Frank, Simon?” I said. “The one about Archy mouthing off during mast?”

  The lines around his mouth deepened. “No, I—”

  “Good gracious, Simon,” Charlie said, at her sweetest and therefore her most deadly. “Don’t tell us Frank forgot to tell you something.”

  Simon looked like he’d been stabbed. “One of Frank’s data bases crunches a terabyte’s worth of numbers every nanosecond. Not once has he ever forgotten anything.”

  “Then perhaps there is a design defect in the hardware,” Charlie cooed.

  “That will do,” I said hopefully.

  “Uh-oh,” someone muttered.

  Caleb was watching with amazement. It was the first time he had ever seen Charlie and Simon in full cry, something I wished I could say.

  “Are you insinuating,” Simon said, enunciating each word with precision, “that the Amazing Grace Model II is a kludge?” The last word was hurled with such passionate loathing that the room burst into laughter.

  “Sounds like a personal problem to me,” Crip muttered, grinning.

  Paddy laughed and said, “Sure, and it was that peaceful this evening I was forgetting where I was.”

  “Go for it, Simon!” Archy cheered. “Defend my honor! AI forever!”

  Caleb transferred his slack-jawed stare to the ceiling pickup, and said wonderingly, “He sounds almost sentient.”

  Simon heard that, and he broke off the fight just long enough to round on Caleb. “The hell you say. The day that pile of crossed-up circuitry starts talking back is the day I start ripping out his wires.”

  “I heard that, boss.”

  “Archy,” I said, exasperated, “I’ve told you before that eavesdroppers never hear anything good about themselves. Now stop tuning into things that don’t concern you before I start ripping out wires myself!” There was silence for a moment, and then I looked at Simon and said painfully, “Did I just yell at a computer?”

  He nodded, and Charlie said, “Now you see why I keep nagging her to go on R&R?”

  “I just spent two weeks downstairs,” I protested.

  “I don’t call that R&R and neither do you,” she said triumphantly.

  Simon, who I had unwarily reminded of his erring wife’s existence, turned back to her and picked up their argument right where it had left off. “There is nothing artificial about intelligence, anyway, Charlie, whether it is generated by living cells or metal chips. Either you’re smart or you ain’t. Archy is.”

  Elizabeth heaved a loud sigh and turned to me, disgust writ large upon her countenance. First they’ll fight, and then they’ll make up and get all mushy. I don’t know which is worse.

  “I know,” I said. “It is not a pretty sight.”

  “Mushy?” Caleb said. “In what context? In my capacity as security supervisor, I have to tell you I get the definite feeling we shouldn’t leave these two alone in a room containing any blunt instruments.”

  By then Simon was going Norbert Wiener and Charlie was returning blow for blow with help from Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud? I thought, and saw my mystification mirrored on the faces around me. There is nobody like Freud to clear a room, and the party began to break up. “Don’t forget the expedition council meeting tomorrow, Crip,” I said. “And maybe you could make it for once in your life, Paddy? Ten hundred hours, people, O’Neill conference room. I’ve got to go to Luna the day after, so don’t miss it, please.”

  Roger took Caleb back to his office, where he had been bunking in spite of my little homily on living over the store. Crip went home with Paddy, and I watched them climb into Paddy’s aircar with my mouth open. Nobody ever tells me anything, and I’m not at my most observant when it comes to personal relationships. The only reason I had known about Charlie and Simon was that in a place as small as the Wart there wasn’t much room to throw things and sometimes Simon missed.

  I grounded the aircar next to my cottage and sat there, gripping the yoke, looking out over the beauty of Ellfive in the twilight. In spite of the enormous meal I didn’t feel remotely sleepy. I felt edgy and restless and unsettled, unable to get the afternoon’s close encounter of the first kind—if it wasn’t that then I was crazy, and I didn’t want to be crazy—out of my mind. I went into the house, changed into my skirt and tights, and slung my skates over one shoulder for the trek up the hill.

  Less than half a klick from my homesite was a small lake nestled in a hollow about the size of a hockey rink, frozen solid by submerged refrigeration lines. Hemlocks stood in a s
mall grove at one end of the rink, barely four feet in height, new green in color and smelling of their own sap. The sloping hills rose up around us to form a tiny amphitheater.

  I sat down on one of the benches lining the lake and laced up my skates. The white leather boots were grimy and creased but the blades were shiny and sharp, and when I removed the guards and stepped out on the rink they bit into the ice with confidence. The ice was hard and took an edge well, without chipping. The friction between blade and ice at half a gee could be tricky; jumps were higher and turns faster, and absolute, calculated control of feet, ankles, and arms were necessary if you didn’t want to build up so much speed that it whirled you right up off the rink. I warmed up with bunny hops and hockey stops, built up speed and did a simple three turn, landing cleanly on my right edge, and extended my left leg up in a backward spiral.

  I had had this rink pretty much to myself for more than two years, at whatever time of the day or night the fancy to skate took me. What would it be like when the colonists came? They’ll want to organize ice shows, I thought sourly, leaning into a Bauer. They’ll put Snoopy on skates for the kiddies. I tacked sharply, leaped into an axel, hands clenched with the effort, did an Arabian, toe loops, splits, camels, flying camels, a series in a routine I had performed long ago to “When the Saints Go Marching In.” I had the ghost of Sonja Henie for company, four hundred thousand meters above the fleecy skies of the globe that gave her birth. I slipped and touched one hand down two thirds of the way through the routine, made a hockey stop, and started over again from the beginning. Talent in a skater is necessary, but discipline and perseverance are what makes talented skaters great.

  Discipline was also essential in an environment four hundred thousand kilometers away from Terra and any semblance of her judicial system or its enforcement arm. The alternative to being cribbed, cabined, and confined by rules written to be understood by the lowest common denominator at the lowest common altitude was to trust in the discipline and good sense of your employees. Justice had to be swift and sure and as public as possible without taking everyone away from their jobs and lining them up to watch, and the sentence had to be of sufficient horror to discourage other would-be offenders. With the majority of the people attracted to space colonization, frontier individualists most of them, object lessons were seldom necessary. Sometimes, however, they were, and I was the boss, so I taught the lesson. But I don’t have to like it, and I never have.