Second Star (Star Svensdotter #1) Read online

  Her face cleared a little. “And you, Star? What are you going to do when it starts getting crowded up there?”

  “Move to Mars,” I said lightly. “The Russians should be glad to see a new face by now. By the way, have you checked the Hewies lately?”

  “No. What’s up?”

  “There’s some activity in area 378, Monitor Seven.” She said nothing. “I was considering going to standby flare alert.”

  “Star, how many times do I have to tell you,” she said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  I shifted beneath her steady gray gaze. “Yeah.” It didn’t change the fact that thirty-two people had died, and died horribly, while I was in charge.

  “Don’t overreact to a little solar activity,” she was saying. “You were the guiding light behind the installation of the Hewies; you should know better than anyone how well they work.”

  I gave a reluctant nod and was about to say good-bye when she raised her hand, halting me. “One more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “What has the Space Patrol been up to lately?”

  I looked at her sharply but I could detect no change in her expression, not that I ever could if she didn’t want me to. She was as enigmatic to me now as when we were roommates at Stanford. “Plenty,” I admitted, and told her about the rape and the subsequent riot, and added as an afterthought the docking screwup with the Taylor.

  Helen was silent.

  “Is there something I should know, Helen?”

  Our eyes met. “Nothing I can prove, Star. Just—keep your eyes open, all right?”

  “It’s the best way I know of to get around.” I cleared my screen, laced my fingers behind my head, and turned to look out the window, straight down Valley One to the North Cap, barely visible through the clouds. I thought about the Space Patrol, and the fight in the hangar, and from there my thoughts proceeded naturally enough to the new security supervisor. Since the cures for cancer and diabetes and Alzheimer’s had been discovered, human life expectancy was well over a hundred and women were remaining fertile into their seventies. Terra’s population was booming in spite of the forced contraception programs in places like India and Bolivaria. Caleb Mbele O’Hara looked like a man who needed elbow room. Maybe that was all there was to it.

  Maybe. “Archy?”

  “I’m here, boss.”

  “What’s the population of New South Africa?”

  “Sixty million, give or take a hundred thousand.”

  “Land area?”

  “After the Diamond War, about the size of Alaska.”

  “So what’s the population density work out to? About a hundred and twenty per square mile?”

  “About.”

  Crowded enough for me to shake the dust of Terra and never look back. “Thanks, Arch.”

  “No sweat, boss. Want to hear about his royal dryness, old king tut?”

  “Not right now, Archy.”

  Archy sounded aggrieved. “You never listen to my jokes anymore, boss. I suppose now I have to go help Helen and Simon play with perfect numbers.”

  “I suppose.” And then I said, “Archy, load Frank.”

  “Loaded.”

  “Run. Flag for messages. Simon, what have you been doing to Archy? He gets more human every day. I don’t think I like it. At least tell him he can’t sound off during director’s mast with cracks about getting out my blindfold and scales. Love Star, end run, exit Frank.”

  “Aw, boss—”

  “Exit Frank, Archy.”

  Was that a sigh, or my imagination? “Done, boss.”

  I wondered how all those flatlanders were going to take the news of a second message from Betelgeuse. Perhaps this time Terrans would be able to take a confirmation of extraterrestrial life more in their stride, and the geocentrism that was such a pervasive factor of Terran life would begin to ease. But I doubted it.

  I knew most Fivers, myself included, had a hard time not figuratively as well as literally looking down on our contemporaries on Terra. From our lordly distance they seemed like so many sheep, so easily panicked, so compliantly led, so effortlessly roused over trifles. All too ready to make a firebreak for a backyard burnoff with a company of flamethrowers and in consequence burning down the entire neighborhood. The American Alliance and the Union of Eurasian Republics were constantly testing each other’s military prowess, taking sides in contests that took place anywhere but on either’s native soil.

  The Mediterranean Conflict was a good example, flaring up in fits and starts since Rehoboam inherited his throne from Solomon. The latest fracas between Israel and Egypt bid fair to lay waste to the entire southwestern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and then what? Libya was already gone, a lifeless monument to a mad dictator. Perhaps Cyrus II of Persia, formerly the individual countries of Syria, Iraq, and Iran, would step in with a firm hand and a reasonable solution. His namesake had placed the Israelis in charge of their homeland of Palestine and respected their religion. Of course that was around 500 B.C.

  I tried to imagine peace in a united Middle East, under a Moslem ruler, no less, and failed miserably.

  There was no place for that kind of divisive chauvinistic nonsense on Ellfive. At the very least, the harsh dictates of vacuum provided for a courteous environment. I placed a call to S. Bolivar Blanca, who was editor of the Ellfive Gazette as well as head of communications and traffic control, and told him of the projected visit of Emily Holbrook Castellano. Bolly greeted the news with a snarl and a decorative curse on my grandchildren.

  So much for courtesy. I cleared my screen and looked at the chronometer. Today I had to check personally on progress in the farming toroids and the zero-gravity industries modules, and that meant I was going EVA. If I had to fight my way in and out of a p-suit I needed all the extra time I could get. I regretfully put thoughts of my warm bed out of my mind and got to my feet.

  “You’ve got your martyr’s expression on, Star,” Archy said.

  “The hell you say.” Then, startled, I said, “How can you tell?”

  “Didn’t you know?” Archy sounded surprised, but it could have been my imagination. “Simon created a new program, Image Interpretation and Analysis. Your ‘Martyr’ look is filed between ‘Mad’ and ‘Myopic.’ ”

  “My eyesight is perfect,” I said indignantly.

  “I don’t think that’s what he meant.”

  I didn’t think so either.

  “Now you look kinda pissed off, Star.”

  I looked at the viewer, half expecting to see the face of a cockroach in a derby hat peering back at me. “Who’s been teaching you that kind of language? Never mind, I don’t want to know.”

  “Okay,” Archy said agreeably. “Want to hear about mehitabel’s extensive past?”

  I gave in. “Sure, and put the coffee on while you’re at it.”

  I know it is theoretically possible for a computer to mimic the behavior of anything, but the trick is in defining the “anything” to the extent that the computer has an unlimited number of responses to any given situation. Most computer personalities I had encountered since the revolution in parallel processing began in the 1990s were wooden and repetitive, if thoroughly competent, in response. Archy was more original than most, but that was because Simon was a more original programmer than most. He never stopped tinkering with Archy’s personality. I remembered coming back from one trip to Terra to find Archy talking like Charlie Chan’s Number One son and sticking “honorable mother” on the front and back of everything he said to me. When Simon started fooling around with Blackwell's voice, Charlie taught her medical log to speak Tagalog, which effectively shut out Simon’s direct access, if not Archy’s.

  So I drank coffee and listened indulgently to Simon’s brainchild. When I was on my second cup and Archy his third story someone thumped on the front door. I opened it and found a sprite on my doorstep. She was a beautiful sprite, slender and faerylike, with an inky black fall of hair, enormous brown eyes slanted up over high elfin cheek
bones, and ears that came almost to a point. At my feet Hotstuff meowed and jumped straight into the sprite’s arms. They touched noses gravely and Hotstuff started purring loud enough to be heard at O’Neill.

  The sprite looked up at me. Hello.

  “Hello, Elizabeth. How did you get here?”

  I stole the aircar.

  I rolled my eyes and said, “Great. Your parents know?”

  ‘Course not. If they knew, it wouldn’t be stealing.

  “Of course not,” I agreed. “I don’t know what I was thinking of.”

  You wouldn’t come to me, Auntie, so I had to come to you.

  “So I see.”

  The mountain to Mohammed. She smiled, a fey, mischievous expression that chased across her face like sunlight through a prism, and suddenly I was very glad she was there. You’re supposed to come to dinner tonight. Seventeen hundred, and Mom says you don’t have to bring anything except yourself, but Dad says you could bring some of Frank’s Christmas present if you want.

  “I’ll be there.”

  You’re going EVA today.

  “Yes.”

  Without me?

  I opened the door wider. “Apparently not. Have you had breakfast?”

  Is Archy making muffins?

  “Blueberry.”

  Then I haven’t had breakfast. She bounced inside. And I need you to help me with a paper Emaa wants me to write.

  “Omigod.” I sat down and fortified myself with coffee. “Okay, kid, lay it on me. What’s your grandmother up to now?”

  You know how she teaches history with socio-anthropological datelines?

  “She taught your mother and me before she started in on you, Elizabeth,” I said. “Believe me, I know how she teaches. What’s your assignment?”

  Well, we were studying twentieth-century American history, and I asked her how come there were so few women running things back then. I mean, there was Thatcher and Meir and Gandhi and Bhutto, but most countries and businesses and everything else downstairs were run by men. Upstairs, it’s the other way around.

  “And you want me to tell you why?”

  Well. You’re kind of an original source reference, Auntie Star. You hired most of the women on Ellfive. And Helen’s your boss.

  “Helen and Frank, Elizabeth,” I said. “They run Colony Control together.” Elizabeth raised one very skeptical eyebrow in my direction. She looked far older than her ten years and a lot like her mother when she did that. “Okay, okay, never mind that now,” I said hastily.

  Elizabeth set her communit to record and I cleared my throat and prepared to be preserved for posterity. “At the end of the twentieth century, the majority of Terran societies persisted in perpetuating themselves as patriarchal entities. This even as women, liberated by equal rights movements in every country—you remember, Terra was split into a couple of hundred countries back then, not half a dozen hegemonies the way it is today?” Elizabeth nodded. “Okay. Where was I?”

  Equal rights movements.

  “Right. So, in spite of the equal rights efforts, women felt their movement into the patriarchal structures of government and business was too slow, plus half the time they got only half the salaries men were making in the same jobs.”

  Weird.

  “Very.”

  Then what?

  “Well, when the Beetlejuice Message shook up everyone downstairs and space exploration and colonization became a reality, capable, ambitious women chose to move off planet. Men were doing fine where they were, they had less incentive to move. So it was only reasonable, even statistically probable, to expect that a majority of extra-Terran leaders in every field would be women. And so it has proved.”

  Elizabeth thought it over. Sounds too easy.

  “Everybody’s a critic,” I said.

  On the point of leaving, we were delayed by a call from Conchata and the first words out of her mouth were, “The son-of-a-bitching bees, Star, the son-of-a-bitching bees!” The third—or was it the fourth now?—set of beehives had been boosted direct from Onizuka Spaceport to the Nearest Doughnut at full gee. The entire crew of the specially modified TAVliner got flightsick and stuck both hands out for hazardous duty compensation. Due to careless handling one hive got loose in the hangarlock; they swarmed and stung a longshoreman into anaphylactic shock. I called Charlie and she said it was touch and go whether the guy would live. I called Bookie in Payroll and found out the guy had a wife and seven kids in Kalamazoo, Michigan. “Let’s get out of here before the ASW union calls, Elizabeth,” I said.

  We were in the aircar speeding to O’Neill forthwith and the first person we stumbled over in Airlock OC-3 was Caleb Mbele O’Hara. The man really was twins.

  “I hear you’re going EVA today,” he said cheerfully. “I’d like to go along, if you don’t mind.”

  I fell back a pace, and said, “What the hell was that sound you were making the other day? The one you used to stop the fight in the hangarlock?”

  He said offhandedly, “It’s how we call hyenas down home.”

  “Oh.” Now who in their right mind would want to call a hyena? Without much hope I said, “I suppose you have been checked out on pressure suits?”

  His face remained perfectly sober but his eyes were laughing at me. “Yes. I was cleared for EVA Wednesday and assigned a suit. I soloed to the capsule catcher. You can check with Daedalus if you like,” he added helpfully.

  “That won’t be necessary,” I said, trying to sound less like Grumpy. “Good job Monday, by the way,” I added.

  “Thank you.”

  “Did you hear how it turned out on Luna?”

  “No.”

  “Lodge executed the four rapists yesterday afternoon, and sentenced the rest of them to life in Luna Maximum.”

  “A good man and true,” O’Hara observed, and looked at Elizabeth. “And this is?”

  “My niece, Elizabeth Quijance-Turgenev. Elizabeth, this is Caleb Mbele O’Hara, the new security supervisor.”

  He looked down at her and said, “Simon’s daughter.”

  “You’ve met Simon, then,” I said.

  “In a manner of speaking,” he said, still looking at Elizabeth.

  Hello, Caleb, she said, her fingers flashing.

  “She says hello,” I told him.

  He looked at me. “She doesn’t talk?”

  “She talks all the time, nonstop,” I said, and Elizabeth looked indignant. “She just doesn’t talk out loud.”

  “Doesn’t, or can’t?”

  I looked at Elizabeth and said, “Won’t,” and had to laugh at Elizabeth’s affronted expression.

  Elizabeth signed hello to me from her crib at seven months. When by the age of two Elizabeth had yet to say “mama” or “chocolate” Charlie threw the not inconsiderable resources of the entire Ellfive medical department behind an effort to find out why. She never did. Elizabeth’s larynx was fine and so was everything else. Elizabeth just didn’t use them. Charlie, who lived to put Humpty-Dumpty together again, almost died of chagrin when she discovered she was helpless to reassemble her own daughter. This might have meant that nothing was broken in the first place, I pointed out, and for my pains didn’t get a home-cooked meal for a month.

  Please don’t talk about me as if I weren’t in the room, Elizabeth said with quaint dignity.

  “I beg your pardon, Elizabeth,” O’Hara said, extending one hand in apology to engulf her tiny palm in his enormous paw.

  Auntie Star doesn’t like spacing people, she said, as usual coming right to the point. Even Luddites.

  I translated, the way I always do for laggards who have yet to learn how to sign. O’Hara’s eyes lifted from Elizabeth’s hands to meet my gaze for a brief, expressionless moment. “I know,” he said.

  Do you do that now?

  “Yes.”

  Good. Elizabeth gave a single, sharp characteristic nod of approval, and dismissed the subject. Is Mbele a Masai name?

  He smiled, squatting on his heels to bring hi
mself down to Elizabeth’s eye level. “No, Zulu. I’m from New South Africa. The Masai live up around Kenya way.”

  Did you have to kill a lion before they’d let you grow up?

  He laughed. “No. The only lions left in Africa are in zoos, and if you kill one of those they throw you in jail.”

  Oh. She thought it over. Archy says you make up limericks.

  I groaned and O’Hara laughed again. “Yes.”

  Can you make up one about me?

  He looked up at the ceiling for inspiration. We waited. After a few minutes he nodded. “I think I’ve got it.

  “At Ellfive the resident elf,

  Put her gravity one day on the shelf.

  In a single bound

  She reached the speed of sound,

  And inertia ran away with her self.”

  That’s really awful, Elizabeth said sternly, trying not to smile. Am I the elf?

  “Yes.”

  Why?

  “You know who the elves are? The High Elven?”

  She nodded vigorously. After Rivendell and Lothlorien, Elizabeth knew all about elves.

  O’Hara smiled into her inquisitive brown eyes. “Then you’ll remember Arwen Evenstar. ‘Queenly she looked, and thought and knowledge were in her glance.’ ”

  Elizabeth was enchanted. So was I, damn it.

  · · ·

  The littlest, skinniest person in the orchestra always plays the tuba, and the largest, hardest-to-fit people always work EVA. These are the philosophical truths by which we live our lives. Even normal-sized people in pressure suits look like a cross between the Michelin Man and the Pillsbury Doughboy, and in spite of fifty years of engineering progress, wearing one is still like wrestling with an octopus from the inside of an inflated balloon. The suits are so expensive in fabrication and maintenance that even my elevated status would not have got me one with my name on it. My size did, though, which meant I didn’t have to smell anyone’s sweat but my own. I sweat a lot and it wasn’t much consolation.

  As I stood in the airlock, hunched over so my helmet wouldn’t scrape the ceiling, I punched the lock cycle and said, “Archy? Can you hear me?” I rubbed my head against the inside of my helmet to push the commlink more securely into my ear.