Second Star (Star Svensdotter #1) Read online

  “Yo.”

  “When does Paddy say the zerogee corridor will be open?”

  He consulted Keystone, the structural engineering program, and looked up the construction schedule. “She says before the colonists arrive.”

  “That’s not good enough. Tell that Irish bootlegger I’m tired of having to go EVA every time I want to visit the Doughnuts or the Frisbee.”

  “Yesterday’s report says they’re having trouble with the bearings in the rotating joints.”

  “Tell them to roust out that Brown and Root architect who dreamed up those damn joints in the first place—what’s his name, Fullenwider?”

  “Fullenwider? You mean Ellensweig?”

  “That’s the guy—I knew it was something like Fullenwider. Can’t Paddy get him on it?”

  There was a brief pause. “Charlie told Blackwell he went space-happy. She certified him unfit for employment and he invalided out.”

  I swore. The hatch popped open and I stepped into space, with nothing showing through my chin window but my own white boots. I grabbed a handhold and steadied myself against Ellfive’s rotation. “Okay, get Keystone to find Craig Bechtel. Tell him he and his crew are reassigned as of now to work exclusively with Paddy on the zeegee corridor until it’s open. Tell them that I expect it to be open by Monday at the latest.”

  “Gotcha, boss. I bet Paddy teaches me some new words when she hears that.”

  So that was who he’d been talking to. I might have known.

  “What kind of a computer is Archy anyway?” O’Hara said, popping out of the hatch in his turn.

  “The Amazing Grace Model II.”

  “Amazing Grace?”

  “That’s right.”

  There was a brief silence. “After the Navy admiral? The first one to call computer glitches ‘bugs’?”

  “The very same,” I said, trying not to sound surprised.

  “I just wanted you to know that I knew who she was,” O’Hara said, sounding satisfied. “Still doesn’t tell me anything, about Archy, I mean.”

  “All right.” I sounded deceptively mild. “He—it is a new-age parallel processor uniting smart-power chips made of silicon with the Seitz Cosmic Cube Model 12 handling over a thousand volts on integrated circuits that aren’t hard-wired.”

  “Oh.”

  O’Hara sounded deflated and I relented. “Or something like that. I never know what the hell Simon is talking about when he’s speaking binary.” I grabbed my way across ten feet of Ellfive’s exterior to a storage rack that held a dozen jetpacks. I had myself strapped in by the time O’Hara was all the way out of the lock and was able to help him into his jetpack, which gave me a nice little glow of superiority until I realized he was perfectly capable of assisting himself. He didn’t chase his tail at all. The first time I tried it I made more RPMs than Ellfive. “You seem to have picked up the hang of this pretty fast,” I observed, “for someone with EVA time still in single digits.”

  “I am pretty quick, aren’t I?”

  I stifled a laugh at the self-congratulation in his voice. “Ready?” I said, after we had double-checked each other’s gear.

  I couldn’t really see his face through the mask but he sounded a little breathless, which made me feel better. “Green lights across the board.”

  “Elizabeth, key your communit to my receiver.”

  After a moment I heard the familiar tinkle of Elizabeth’s code. Punch it, Auntie!

  I had to grin, even though she couldn’t see it.

  “She can talk to you from her suit?” O’Hara asked.

  “Archy made up a code and Daedalus fixed her up with a special glove with a keypad in it. Archy’ll translate for you.”

  Elizabeth waved the squared-off gauntlet on her right hand at Caleb and her code tinkled. After a moment I heard O’Hara laugh. He gave her a thumbs-up.

  “Okay,” I said, “on me, on three. One, two—”

  On three I kicked out of the foothold and fired my verniers to jet away from Ellfive’s surface. Riggers and mechanics worked in p-suits in vacuum all day every day. They got so good at EVA maneuvers that they could let go from the centrally located valley locks at exactly the right moment so as to use Ellfive’s 644-kph rotation to sling them to their work area. They used the verniers on their jetpacks for direction and braking, almost never for propulsion. Not me. I was always afraid that if I tried it I’d wind up in orbit around Tau Ceti, a gift to the galaxy with love from Ellfive.

  We came up over the edge of the North Cap, dropped our polarizers against Sol’s glare, and sped down the length of the cylinder three hundred meters above the surface. “First stop today is Farming Toroid Two, or FT-2 for short.”

  “Also known as the Farthest Doughnut,” O’Hara said.

  “Right. In order, attached to the South Cap from the outside in are the paraboloidal solar collector, the power station, the farming toroids, and the zero-gravity industries module.”

  I could almost hear him squinting against Sol’s rays to make out the shapes in front of us. “All the facilities have the same diameter as the Ellfive cylinder?”

  “Yes, six and a half kilometers, but only the doughnuts rotate to provide gravity to the agricultural areas.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Plants are like us, they grow best with something to pull against. The solar collector and the power station are stationary because they are designed for zero gravity—no moving parts, no friction, no wear and tear—and the zero-gravity module is here specifically for industry to take advantage of zerogee and vacuum manufacturing.”

  We matched orbits with the main airlock on the Farthest Doughnut, a fat gray toroid with a wide belt of solar windows that looked like a line of silvery icing, and told Archy to let Roger know I had come to see and conquer.

  And sweat, Elizabeth said.

  “That too,” I said, and cycled the lock.

  Roger took my helmet as I struggled out of my p-suit, and handed me a towel. “I’ll bet hell isn’t as hot as this place,” I said, mopping my sweating face. Knowing what to expect I had dressed for the trip in shorts and a thin shirt, but as always I felt like a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty and loaded for bear.

  Persis Nehru, another agronomist, paid close attention as O’Hara emerged from his p-suit. When he stood up she caught my eye in a deeply appreciative, purely feminine glance that was easily interpreted as a subvocal “Wow.”

  I grinned and O’Hara caught me at it. Persis quickly passed out extra breathers. O’Hara watched as Elizabeth and I clipped the tube to one nostril and the O2 pack to our belts. “The CO2 count in the farming toroids is high,” she explained, “which is good for the plants and great for inducing headaches in the farmers.” He nodded and clipped on his own breather, and we stepped from the airlock into the warm, moist air of Farming Toroid Two.

  I was raised on an arctic coast, surrounded by green mountains and blue sea, and the tangled jungle of the Farthest Doughnut made me claustrophobic. The side of the toroid curved up in back of us, overhead, in front of us, and down around beneath our feet again, and extended in concentric arcs to our left and right. The vegetation was so thick it was hard to detect the curve in the walls. It was like being inside of Terra, a Terra drained of oceans and shorn of mountains and turned outside in like a pillowcase. The only relief to this sea of living, grasping green was the belt of solar windows, open to the reflectors outside, which poured in a steady, unceasing stream of Sol’s rays. Nowhere else in the planned stations and colonies of space, not even in FT-1, had I ever encountered such an undisciplined-looking habitat. I knew, intellectually, that this disorder was appearance only. I knew, intellectually, that FT-2 was an efficiently balanced ecosystem designed to produce maximum food with minimum fuss. But each time I entered the Farthest Doughnut I clutched instinctively for a machete, and when I left I always had the crawly feeling that there was something alive inside my p-suit besides me.

  In contrast to the groves of fruit-b
earing trees, which seemed ready to march in conquest on the rest of the arable land at any given moment, the cultivated fields looked as though they had their backs to the photosynthetic wall. One slip, one corner overrun, one furrow lost to an encroaching carambola tree and it would be all over. A pair of hummingbirds whizzed by our heads and I saw the flash of a rabbit’s tail. We walked down a path to a small orchard of trees bowed under the weight of bunches of small, reddish bananas. “Go bind thou up young dangling apricocks,” I said, pointing.

  “Red Orinocos,” Persis corrected me, and picked one for each of us. The skin was thin, the meat firm and tasty. I nodded my appreciation with my mouth full. She read the glint in my eyes correctly and picked me another. “The lazy man’s fruit,” she said. “A little fertilizer, a lot of water, almost no cutting back or thinning, and viola! Dessert.”

  I said through a mouthful of banana, “What are those?”

  “Theobroma cacao. For chocolate.”

  Yum, Elizabeth said. How can they get enough sun, planted under the banana trees like that?

  “Theobroma cacao is a very prima donnish kind of plant,” Persis said, putting on her UCLA lecturer’s voice. Elizabeth smiled at me behind Persis’s back. “Full tropical sun will kill it. On Terra it is subject to all kinds of fungi and bacteria, so it has always been grown beneath the shade of banana and rubber trees. That way, if the cacao tree died, the fanner’s income was guaranteed from another source.”

  “Sensible.” I inspected the cacao pods, which looked like furry, oversize footballs. “If Helen Ricadonna had told me when she yanked me off a drilling platform in the Navarin Basin that this job would make me a jackleg botanist, I would have laughed in her face. Which reminds me. Can you use another botanist, Roger?”

  Roger looked at me with his usual sorrowful expression. “Do you even have to ask?”

  “You ever hear of Yelena Bugolubovo?”

  Roger stared at me, arrested in full moan. “Z. Y. Bugolubovo? The ‘On the Hydroponic Propagation of Food Grains in Zero Gravity’ Bugolubovo?”

  “The very same.” I had had Archy look up the love of Vitaly Viskov’s life in Who’s Who in Science. “So, can you give her a job?”

  “Christ!” Roger said. I blinked. “Do you know who she is?” he asked Persis. “Do you know what she does?” he asked Elizabeth. “Do you realize who we’re talking about here?” he asked O’Hara, who had yet to say a word. Before any of us could respond he looked around the tangled green surroundings of FT-2, threw up his hands, and shouted, “This place is a mess! What’s she going to think?” He broke into a trot in the general direction of the experimental station buildings, dictating rapidly into his communit as he went.

  I looked at Persis. “Do you think he can find her a job?”

  Persis was laughing, too. “You might need someone to do Roger’s job after she gets here.”

  “I was going to ask him if he was having any more problems that I could help with, but I think I’ll have to settle for you. How are the mameys doing?”

  “We talked to the University of Cuba, as you suggested, and their School of Agriculture gave us a few tips. The dean hit me up for a job. He and his family have their applications in for immigration.”

  “Good.”

  “One thing, Star. The humidity in here is still too low for really maximum productivity. We need some more hydrogen.”

  “You want it wetter?” I passed the back of my hand across my forehead. It came away dripping.

  Persis nodded, not smiling.

  I shook my head in disbelief. “I’ll get on the horn to Helen. We might have to preempt the next seed shipment, though. Roger will love that; he already thinks we dedicate far too much Express tonnage to inessentials like machinery and people as it is.”

  “Do it quick and he’ll be so caught up with la Bugolubovo he won’t even notice.”

  “You’re getting as devious as Helen these days, Persis,” I said severely. “I’ll get on it as soon as I get back to my office.” I wiped my forehead again, and said with a gloom to rival Roger’s, “Wetter.”

  “Look on the bright side, Star. You can’t beat Ellfive agriculture for trouble-free propagation. No bugs, no fungi, no nematodes, no viruses. And no one hoofing it over the back fence with your best peaches.”

  “Yet,” I said, and the image of some kid in patched overalls, freckles, and uncontrollable hair sneaking into FT-2 to commit grand theft fruit was cheering enough to banish the woe caused by Doughnuts’ insatiable demands for water and more water.

  The visit to FT-1 was a relief, cooler and dryer, although O2 breathers were still necessary. We climbed up to the coffee plantation, where the beans looked ready to pick. I could hardly wait; finally we were going to be able to dump that hydrox stuff from Colombia, which looked like cocaine and tasted like pine tree sap and had a lift cost second only to that of hand tools.

  One section of the Nearest Doughnut was blocked off for the vats, where we conducted the mycoprotein cultivation of meats and the fixed-bed-enzyme synthesis of milk. Sol’s rays poured unchecked into the tanks to stimulate the yeast cultures; outside the tanks it frosted twice each year for the benefit of the apples and the pumpkins and the potatoes. The ducks were as messy and noisy as ever, the chicken farm smelled like a chicken farm and the hogs smelled even worse because, so Greta Hochleitner frigidly informed me, some gottverdammt fool had mixed a bushel or so of rhubarb leaves in with the corn and sweet potato cuttings that made up their feed.

  “That could have happened on a farm on Terra,” I observed, my spirits insensibly lightened to hear of a problem there was nothing I could do to resolve.

  “Not on my farm on Terra,” Greta said, her face carved whole out of disapproving Minnesota granite.

  I agreed meekly. I wondered what had happened to the gottverdammt fool. I decided on the whole it was better not to ask. He or she was probably pushing up wheat germ or worse, permanently assigned to the pigs.

  The zero-gravity industries module had been the first facility to begin construction and was the first to be completed. Frank and Helen believed, wisely, that the sooner a return could be shown on the space habitat investment, the sooner the nay-saying Nierbogs and Chandras in the Alliance Congress would be pacified. The Frisbee was carved like a nautilus shell into spiral wedges, the only common denominator being the 180-meter depth, divided in two. Each cubicle had direct access to vacuum and each had unlimited power, courtesy of Ellfive’s solar power station. There any similarities from one cubicle to the next came to a screeching halt.

  We had held an ad hoc executive meeting twelve years before, Helen and Frank and I. Over the vociferous protests of the Habitat Commission we decreed that Ellfive would charge no rent for Frisbee space, oh dear me no. Ellfive accepted applications from prospective leaseholders, vetted the proposed projects of thousands of scientists, inventors, and businessmen, paid their way to Ellfive, housed them comfortably, fed them superbly, provided a laissez-faire atmosphere and adequate facilities for pleasurable leisure time activities, and waited patiently until each entrepreneur developed a marketable product.

  Then Ellfive took twenty-five percent of the gross, before expenses and before taxes and before anyone else they were in hock to got so much as a penny. Helen wanted forty and Frank sixty-five but I beat them down. I wanted the Frisbee healthy and prosperous; now that it was self-supporting and showing a small but steadily increasing profit I was toying with the idea of cutting back our percentage. It was time to spread some of the fiscal responsibility around, or did I mean share the wealth? I’ve never been strong in economics. But I might run it by the Frisbee Council, I thought, listening with half an ear to Jerry Pauling describe the latest semi-miraculous long-chain polymer his group was synthesizing for a graphite-based starship hull material, the first such to be completely manufactured in space.

  “Sounds like it’s going to do everything but take out the garbage,” O’Hara commented as we were suiting up. “Are all the Fri
sbeeites this charged up about their work?”

  “Actually, Jerry’s one of our calmer researchers,” I said, holding Elizabeth’s gauntlet for her.

  “And they’re all making money?”

  “Oh, well, we’ve got a few wide-eyed dreamers who believe in research for research’s sake, who shun the crass commercialism of their peers, and that’s fine. Pure research has its place, and R&D always pays off.” I reflected, and added, “If not always in a way the researcher expects.”

  “So you’re willing to put up with a certain amount of exploration into the sex life of snails,” O’Hara said solemnly, but with a smile in his green eyes.

  “I suppose so. There’s not a lot I have to put up with. Most of the Frisbee’s leaseholders are as interested in making a buck as we are. If their product also happens to be good for mankind, that’s fine, too, but it’s only a bonus. Profits are what make the Frisbee rock and roll.” In that spirit Colgate/Lilly and Bristol-Myers had constructed labs on site as soon as atmosphere was established and had begun shipping drugs downstairs within the year. Here, four hundred thousand kilometers from diseased, infected Terra, were the perfect conditions for distilling insulin for those diabetics still in remission, interleukin for the last of the cancer victims, and the hormonoids that were extending the life and fertility of every man, woman, and child in the system. Late in the previous year Lever Brothers had developed a vaccine against the common cold virus and was mass producing it at Ellfive, and the profit projections made my mouth water.

  Elizabeth looked up from her helmet, twinkling at me. The Frisbee offends Mom’s humanitarian instincts. She says it’s like selling typhoid vaccine for top dollar in the middle of a plague.

  “Yes, well, your father, who has no humanitarian instincts, is already designing a computer program to put the Lever process on automatic. For a small fee, natch.”

  Natch. And then they’ll all want one, especially Revlon.

  “Revlon?” O’Hara said, half laughing. “The powder puff people?”