Second Star (Star Svensdotter #1) Read online

  Elizabeth shook her head at him. Don’t you sneer at the powder puff people, Caleb. The starstone was discovered in an accident in the Revlon lab.

  O’Hara’s expression changed from amusement to respect, and so it should have. Clear as a diamond, as glowing as an emerald, as fiery as a ruby, the starstone was a crystal that began life in a vacuum petrie from a slopped-over mixture of facial masque and wrinkle eraser, with an organic catalytic agent Revlon was understandably keeping very hush-hush. The gem was actually alive when harvested, and interacted with individual body chemistry to change hues according to the mood of the wearer. The longer it was worn the more brilliant it grew, and the manufacturing tax on the starstone alone accounted for an eight percent correction in the balance of payments deficit Ellfive had with the American Alliance. I prayed nightly for the health and well-being of the Terran nouveau riche.

  It was late that afternoon when we finally finished all three tours of inspection. I was exhausted from struggling in and out of jetpack and p-suit seven times in eight hours and I was not looking forward to an eighth ordeal, even if it was the last of the day. I took my time going home and Elizabeth and O’Hara made no objection.

  And why should they? The view was spectacular. Sol was at our backs, and on our right silvery Luna was being pursued by a hunting pack of stars. On our left hung the spidery latticework that was the spare skeletal beginnings of Island Two. Three hundred meters below our feet Ellfive was a glittering, spinning cylinder, and 322,000 klicks beyond it was the steady glow of GEO Base and a string of solar power stations, a sparkling necklace clasped to Terra’s blue-white throat.

  She looked, at this distance, so various, so beautiful, so new. Lovely Terra, where in some places the Chernobyl- and Seabrook-tainted air smelled worse than the inside of my p-suit. Beautiful Terra, where in other places a Remington scattergun was more common to hand than a toothbrush, and more necessary. Blissful Terra, where it still rained and snowed when it would and where it would. Oh, to be in England, my ass.

  I spread my arms, embracing the Big Blue Marble. My hands spanned the equator easily. As always, I looked for Denali. As always, I couldn’t find it. If I shifted my right hand I could throw the entire eastern seaboard into a manual eclipse.

  Tell O’Hara about “The Day Star Went Nova,” Elizabeth said.

  I mumbled something, and O’Hara said, “What?”

  “Elizabeth wants me to tell you about my first trip EVA,” I said. Elizabeth giggled and of course then I had to tell him.

  Extra-vehicular activity had not always been such a fine careless rapture. My duty at Luna Base had been so frantic with activity that I had had no time for the esthetics and so when I first went spacewalking at Ellfive I was agog with anticipation, thrilled at the prospect of occupying the all-time front row seat. I, Star Svensdotter, Mrs. Svensdotter’s little girl from the wrong side of Kachemak Bay, would have the universe at my feet and, moreover, someone was actually paying me to look. I might even write a poem in celebration of the event, dedicated to my father in elegant prose.

  “On First Looking Into the Face of the Universe” (heroic couplets, I thought, or perhaps an Italian sonnet) would have to wait. I spent most of my first EVA dodging space cranes, reaction tugs, honeycomb clusters of thirty-thousand-kilogram steel-and-aluminum external fuel tanks from the first STS shuttles, half-finished solar cells, and free-floating stockpiles of LIMSH. True, it was all left motionless relative to the orbit of Ellfive. What weren’t motionless were approximately one thousand solarscooters which, zipping through the maze with happy abandon, took turns trying to run me down. I ducked one that came back for a sporting second try and a torqueless wrench set in motion by a careless rigger tumbled so close to my visor that my first EVA was very nearly my last. “I felt like I’d wandered into the middle of a vidgame,” I told O’Hara, “and after I made it back inside alive and changed my shorts I told a few people how I felt, and I fired a few others, just to get their attention.”

  Dad said you couldn’t have done anything better to endear yourself to the average Ellfive working stiff than to pin the ears back on a few jet jockeys, Elizabeth said.

  “I wasn’t trying to be endearing, Elizabeth, I just wanted to survive my next EVA.”

  “That must have been when you set up the Warehouse Ring,” O’Hara said.

  “Yeah, I moved all construction materials to an orbit sixteen klicks out from Ellfive’s axial equator. Then I restricted scooter traffic to twenty-four klicks an hour within that ring and set minimum altitude at three hundred meters above Ellfive’s surface. I pulled a reaction tug from the Lagrange-Luna route and rededicated it full-time to moving materials at minimum speed from the Warehouse Ring to Ellfive proper on a strictly need-to-use-now basis. The logisticians squawked but I could pretty much do what I wanted to back then.”

  So what’s different now?

  “Quiet, brat. And then Simon worked up a traffic control program to monitor and police all traffic, jetpack, scooter, tug, shuttle, TAVliner, Express, mass driver capsules, before I went EVA again.”

  And then Paddy wrote “The Day Star Went Nova.”

  “What,” O’Hara said, “is that a poem?”

  A song, Elizabeth told him, and a good one, too.

  I hoped she hadn’t heard the same version I had. It was all history anyway now, eleven years back, before Ellfive had atmosphere or spin or even the real shape of what it was to be, before Archy was, or Elizabeth. We were all living in a translucent geodesic dome stuck to bare scaffolding like a wart on a robot’s broken nose. Water and calories without even a token resemblance to food were strictly rationed and our surroundings were, to say the least, utilitarian. The only up was in relation to Terra until I had a roustabout paint in a dark floor and a blue-white ceiling. I thought longingly of dinner at Charlie’s and afterward, my bed in my cottage in my Big Rock Candy Mountains, and I leaned back into the arms of my jetpack and triggered the verniers. “Come on, Elizabeth. Race you to the lock.”

  There was no corresponding kick or acceleration. I frowned and thumbed the switch a second time.

  My visor went black, as black as space without stars. It was either that or I had gone suddenly blind. “Elizabeth?”

  There was no reply.

  “O’Hara? Are you there?”

  Silence.

  This was silly. Keeping my voice as calm as I could, I said, “Archy? Archy, are you there?”

  But my voice made no sound.

  And then I began to see the voices.

  But no, they weren’t voices. There were no words, no sentences, no sound. Or yes, there was sound, though I couldn’t hear it. There were pictures, too, pictures I couldn’t see. I was bereft, and cried with frustration, but no tears slid down my face.

  And then I was staggered, and then soothed, by the touch of something, some force that felt me, felt through me, slid through my skin and stroked the veins in my limbs, the cells in those veins, the very atoms in those cells. I was flooded with a dark force so bright it would have blinded me but that I had no eyes to see. I felt my mind begin to speak a language of imagery and shape and delicate grace, without my willing it and yet, not against my will. It was an invasion so visceral it was almost sexual.

  And there was something else, someone else, not just nibbling at the periphery of my consciousness but occupying the next seat over from my cerebral cortex and reading with dedicated interest the record of my whole life, my hopes, aspirations, dreams, desires, wants, needs. Each experience was removed from its place in my memory, thoroughly examined, and replaced. It was as if a curious, methodical child were playing with a completed jigsaw puzzle, taking out a piece at a time, in exact order, to examine the shape and texture and even the taste of each piece individually, then looking at the puzzle without the piece, and then replacing the piece to view the picture the puzzle made whole and intact.

  I was not forced, I was led. I was not invaded, I was visited. I felt a curiosity so intense it drow
ned out the clamoring of my own will, but the curiosity was my own. I felt a hunger so fierce, so terrible in its need that it consumed every other impulse and instinct. I would never know everything I wanted to know, and I despaired. I had an eternity in which to learn, and I rejoiced. I knew that eternity was far too little time, and I raged.

  At last, at last, I opened my eyes to the sight of Elizabeth’s p-suit floating outside Airlock OC-3, the one closest to my office, the one through which the late unlamented J. Moore had made his final inelegant exit. The digital readout in the corner of my visor blinked at me, its tiny red figures counting down in a placid and inexorable manner. It told me that less than a second had passed since the blackout had begun over thirty kilometers away. Fuddled, I thought, I would be justified in throwing myself off Ellfive for traveling at that speed. It was another moment before I realized that I had never traveled that fast, that no one ever had.

  Over the commlink O’Hara sounded old. “Star?”

  I turned my head inside my helmet and saw him floating on my left. “Yes.” I was slightly surprised to hear my own voice, weak but in working condition.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. I think so. Elizabeth?”

  There was a brief, heart-stopping pause, before I heard the familiar tinkle of notes in my communit. I’m all right, Auntie Star. What was that?

  “I don’t know, sweetheart.” It was a moment, several, before I could even make a move toward the lock, and the way I felt it would take me hours to get out of my p-suit.

  “Star?” I heard O’Hara speak from a great distance, his voice thin and tinny.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Yes.”

  “No, I mean I’m really hungry. My gut feels like it’s chewing on the end of my windpipe.”

  “I know. So does mine.” Actually it felt as if my stomach was crawling up my esophagus. It was either hunger or nausea and could be both. “Elizabeth?”

  Me, too, Auntie. I’m starving.

  “Take your fructose tablets, Elizabeth. Both of you. They should have enough calories to get us inside and out of these suits.”

  O’Hara’s voice was rusty, exhausted, joyless, and totally without conviction. “Someone has finally invented something more fun than sex.”

  — 4 —

  A Little Night Music

  It is in the long run essential to the growth of any new and high civilization that small groups of men can escape from their neighbors and from their governments to go and live as they please in the wilderness.

  —Freeman Dyson

  WE RANSACKED THE COMMISSARY for something to contain our ravenous appetites until dinner. The aircar journey to Valley Two was quick and quiet. All too soon we were on the ground next to the white cottage that stood on a small rise at the north end of Loch Ness. I got out to take a look at the water mark. When all else fails, routine.

  Loch Ness was still below minimum capacity. “Damn it,” I muttered. “That settles it. I’ve got to go to Luna.”

  O’Hara stood next to me and looked up the loch. “How long is it?”

  “About three klicks,” I said, “and one klick wide.”

  “Where did it all come from?”

  “Some from the comet trap, and more from Terra. Roughly half of it came from Luna.”

  “I didn’t realize there was this much water on Luna.”

  “Polar probes in the early nineties discovered large quantities of oxygen and hydrogen. Copernicus Base ships it over by mass driver.”

  “Mass driver?”

  “Sort of an electromagnetic slingshot. There’s a mass catcher sixteen klicks out in the warehouse orbit. We crack the capsules there and reaction tugs bring the cargo the rest of the way in.” I fell silent, watching Sol set in the reflective ripples of the loch. “O’Hara—”

  “My name,” he said, enunciating his words carefully, “is Caleb.”

  I paused. “Okay,” I said at last, “Caleb. You could have written your own ticket in New South Africa. Why didn’t you?”

  “Maybe I wasn’t ready to join the family firm.” His voice was half serious, half mocking. “Why are you here? Why does Star Svensdotter run a space habitat?”

  “I wanted a Roc’s egg.” He looked blank, and I said, “Robert Heinlein in Glory Road.” I quoted, “ ‘What did I want? I wanted a Roc’s egg… I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies!… I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and the Lost Dauphin.’ ”

  “Heinlein,” he said, frowning thoughtfully. “Like the park?”

  I closed my eyes and shook my head. “Yes. Heinlein, like the park.”

  “So,” he said. “A Roc’s egg. That the only reason?”

  “My father was a king crab fisherman in the Gulf of Alaska. When I was little he would take me out on the Aleutian Princess now and then, so I would know how he made our living.” I smiled in memory. “Charlie was going to be a doctor from age two. Dad knew I was his only hope to take over the Princess.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “What happened?”

  Dusk deepened to twilight and with the dying of the light I looked up, straining to see through the blue-tinted solar windows. Caleb and Elizabeth stood on either side of me, their faces lifted, too. “Have you ever been on a boat anchored in Kamishak Bay, in the middle of an Alaskan November? I have. No city lights, no other boats, just Dad and me on the Princess. All Dad had was a pair of binoculars, but he would take me up on the flying bridge and show me nebulas and red giants and white dwarfs. One time we saw a globular cluster, real low on the horizon. He showed me the constellations and told me the names of their stars and taught me how to use them to get home if the compass broke. One night I couldn’t sleep, so I went out on deck and looked up. And there were all these stars, streaking across the sky, enough shooting stars to keep me in wishes the rest of my life. I was scared to death. I ran and got Dad up and told him the sky was falling.” I laughed a little. “He told me it was the Leonid meteor shower. I asked him where they came from. From outer space, he said.” I looked at Caleb. “It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him. It was just that I wanted to see for myself. That’s all, really.”

  Caleb smiled at me. It was a quiet, appreciative, unchallenging sort of smile. I said urgently, “No one in your department felt anything? No blackouts? No fainting spells? No visions? Nothing?”

  His smile disappeared. “No.” His voice was flat and unemotional.

  Nothing at all? Elizabeth asked plaintively, and he shook his head.

  “Vacuum dreams,” I said unconvincingly. “It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s imagination ran off with them after they spent too long EVA in a pressure suit.”

  It’s the first time it has ever happened to you, she said. And you don’t have much of an imagination, Auntie Star.

  “Thanks a lot, kid,” I said. “What did they feel like to you?”

  She thought about it for a few moments, her little face grave and still, and then she looked up at me and smiled. O joy, O rapture, O bountiful Jehovah. I must have gaped at her because she added, You know. Like Toad in the motor car.

  “You thought it was fun?” I said, just to make sure, and she nodded, looking at me expectantly.

  Nothing less than the truth would do for Elizabeth, so I gave it to her. “It unnerved me, Elizabeth. Whatever it was, it left me tired and hungry. I want to eat, and sleep, and take some time to think it all over, and wait and see if—” I broke off.

  If it happens again?

  “God forbid,” Caleb said.

  Elizabeth was dismayed. You didn’t think it was fun?

  “No, Elizabeth,” he said, apologetically but firmly, “I’m afraid I did not think it was fun. I just felt like I’d been walking around my whole life with my fly open. Embarrassing.”

  Oh. Oh, dear, she sa
id, and added, we better not tell Mom and Dad. We don’t have any explanations, and it would only worry them.

  I had to smile. At times Elizabeth seemed more like a fifty-year-old matron than a ten-year-old girl. “Elizabeth, sometimes you scare me.”

  Without warning she dived into my arms, fiercely hugging as much of me as she could reach around. Her fervor startled me; she wasn’t normally a demonstrative child. “What’s all this?” I said, rocking back on my heels. I held her close.

  I love you.

  “I love you, too.”

  I know.

  We were silent then for a long time, Elizabeth in my arms and Caleb at my side, standing at the head of a long blue lake reflecting more blue from the windowed sky above. “Well,” Caleb said at last, “Joan of Arc heard voices, too.”

  “Yeah, and look what happened to her,” I said, and felt Elizabeth’s shoulders shake in a silent laugh. “But why am I not afraid?”

  Or me?

  “I am.” He bit off the words, and I realized with something of a shock that beneath his stoic exterior Caleb Mbele O’Hara was quietly enraged. “I don’t like being turned on and off like a trivee in somebody’s living room. I felt like I was the subject of the latest “Interplanetary Geographic Special,” going up against Space Doctor on Channel 5 and Galactic Bandstand on Channel 11. I’m scared, all right.”

  “I’m not,” I said. It was the truth, and it puzzled me. “I don’t know why not.”

  Me, either.

  His hand slid over mine and squeezed. “Oh, hell. Maybe it was just the Beetlejuicers, paying their respects.”

  Elizabeth looked at me, an eyebrow raised, but before we could say anything we heard Simon’s basso profundo behind us. “What are you doing, standing around out here?”

  “Just admiring the view,” I said, turning.

  “Just checking on the water level, you mean,” Simon said. “Give it a rest, Star, at least for tonight.” He grinned at Caleb.

  “Caleb O’Hara, meet Ellfive’s compsci department and my second in command, Simon Turgenev.”