Red Planet Run (5 page)

For a moment I couldn’t place the name. “No.”

“Hatsuko Matsumoro, 7871No Return.”

Again, memory returned in a rush. The third stop on the rock hop Caleb, Leif, the twins, and myself had taken so long ago. The short, merry woman with the rollicking crew, sitting on a rock paying out high-grade silver, so glad to see new faces that they gave us their own beds, so pleased with our company that they had extended us an open invitation to visit again any time. It was an invitation I had not taken them up on, and now never would. “Oh, no.”

“I’m afraid so. One of Matsumoro’s crew survived long enough to give us a partial description. Archy did the rest.” She looked at me soberly. “This is one of the bad guys, Star. The bodies he’s left behind are—” She shook her head. “Never mind, it’s almost supper time. Suffice it to say he doesn’t always kill first. He’s smart, too; every attack has been planned for when the Guard on the beat has been at the farthest point in his swing-through.”

“What does he look like?” All I remembered were pupils expanded to cover the entire iris, black and impenetrable.

She dropped her feet and swung her viewer around. “Archy?”

A face topped with the Patrolman’s dress beret stared out at me. Nothing went together with anything else: His brows were thick, his eyes were thin; he had a short nose and a long upper lip; his mouth was a slash of red flesh. Even in the standard, posed class photograph, the gaze was fierce and direct. Oddly, the more I looked at Kwan’s face, the more his expressionless mouth seemed to widen in a smile, as if he knew something I didn’t and would, one day, take great pleasure in explaining it to me, in detail.

My eyes met Perry’s. She said sternly, “You see him again, you shoot first and ask questions afterward, you hear?”

“I hear.”

Ancient astronauts didn’t build the pyramids. Human beings built the pyramids, because they’re clever, and they work hard.

 

—Gene Roddenberry

 

A WEEK LATER
we commissioned the first habitat to come off the assembly line of A World of Your Own, Inc.

I went over early to inspect the premises. From the outside, it looked like any other asteroid I’d ever seen, only this one was more regularly spheric in shape and was generating one gee on the interior equator with a 1.97-per minute rotation. Its original catalogue number was 12146, its original name Lucky Strike, a rock already hollowed out by a group of miners moiling for nickel. The vein played out and their fortunes made, the miners downed picks, sold us their claim for a pittance, and boarded the Cunard liner
Charles III
for home, riding in the Presidential Suite and ordering champagne with every meal. They were probably broke before the ship docked at HEO Base.

The rock’s dull gray exterior was pockmarked with impact craters. Most of the craters had been filled in and troweled over with silicon cement, maintaining the roughly even thickness of the inert shielding left in place by Whitney Burkette and his Meekmaker crew when they melted out the interior. At the sphere’s Tropic of Cancer a long slender mirror was sliding slowly into its mounting. It was one unit of a ring of panels soon to be angled to reflect Sol’s rays through the bank of windows circling the sphere, 23.5 degrees above where on the interior I hoped I’d find an equatorial river with no falls in it. I’d known Roberta McInerny a long time. I wasn’t confident.

“Let’s hit air!” Simon said impatiently, and I broke orbit and brought us down. The lock was easy to spot; it was one of the very few smooth, finished pieces of real estate on the exterior. I set the scooter down and hooked on to a cleat. We clambered out and pulled handholds across to the personnel hatch. One at a time, we rotated inside. Humberto Bengoachea waited for us to peel out of our pressure suits.

“Ben. How’s it going?”

He shrugged. “Same ole, same ole. Except those engineers are saying they wanted a light rail system.”

“So?”

Ben was a small brown man with a small brown face and small brown eyes. He matched his brown jumpsuit, which showed signs of having been slept in. He ran stubby fingers through already disheveled hair. “So we didn’t plumb for one. The original design called for no vehicle more heavy duty than a bicycle.”

I closed my eyes and tried to conjure up a vision of the contract between A World of Your Own, Inc., and the Off-Planet Engineering Company. It was only about 650,000 words long. I opened my eyes again and said, “Look, Ben, I’m sure bike paths and only bike paths were specified in the contract; get Archy to call it up and review the specific clauses. And let me know what the two of you find out.”

“Can do.”

I started to turn, and stopped. “Ben?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re an agronomist; what’re you doing dealing with this? Where’s that traffic engineer, what’s his name—”

“Dave Hauer,” Simon said.

Ben gave us a hollow grin. “Him? Oh, he’s down with Ceresian flu.”

“Wonderful,” I said morosely. “Half of Outpost is, too.”

Ari Greenbaum and Maggie Lu were standing next to the model home in Village One, watching the carpenters beat on it with hammers. The place was a shambles, odd pieces of silicon prefab stacked haphazardly against bare studs, gaping holes in the kitchen and bathroom through which we could see as yet unconnected ceramic pipes, cable and conduit underfoot everywhere. Simon accidentally stepped on the thin sheeting covering the airlock frame and sank in up to his knees. It took three of us to pull him out. The air was thick with sawdust; we both sneezed continually until Maggie gave us masks.

The front door did close. As if to compensate, the back door wouldn’t open. “Why am I here?” Maggie asked the ceiling.

A panel of Leewall, tacked into place by one corner, slipped, and carpenter John Begaye jumped to catch it before the whole panel came crashing down. He readjusted the panel and drove in half a dozen staples. The panel protested but held, who knew for how long. “Pretty good all right,” he decided, but then John was Navajo by birth and stoic by inclination, and if the entire sphere had been two minutes away from total collapse he would have said exactly the same thing.

“The kobolds it is,” Dieter Joop said portentously.

“What’s a kobolds?” someone, unfortunately, wanted to know, and before Dieter could get started yet again on the story of the malicious imps that haunt mines and miners in German folk tales, I looked a plea at Simon. He nodded. “Let’s get out of here while we still can.”

It took us twenty minutes to climb up to the axis, and when we got there we weren’t even breathing hard.

It wasn’t that much of a view, yet. We were standing inside a gray-brown ball with a monotonous interior relieved so far only by three flattish areas spaced more or less equally between the Tropics, the sites for the three villages. One of them would be located directly across from where we were standing, 450 meters away. Elsewhere, there were half a dozen groupings of smaller foundations spaced farther apart for the engineers and future colonists of the sphere to take advantage of the differing gravities on the interior shell. A shallow ditch marched its way around the sphere’s circumference. I hated to admit it but Roberta was right; that damn river did look boring. Still, it wasn’t my river, and it wouldn’t be my World any longer than it took the check to clear on the last payment due.

There was no green to speak of, and the atmosphere was still so dry that there wasn’t even the barest hint of cloud. The banks of lamps that lit the work areas inside the sphere lightened the interior to no better than dim; that would change when the last mirror slid into place outside and the completed array began to fill the interior with Sol’s reflected glory. Solar power, solar heating, solar lighting— the solar virtue of this World was going to be one hundred and one percent. Always assuming the array worked once it was assembled.

I felt a sudden pang of nostalgia. The sphere bore little resemblance to Terranova, but as stripped down as it was, I could imagine the view in five years. The lush green vegetation, sucking up carbon dioxide and churning out oh-two; the blue of the distant river aerating the habitat’s water supply; the polar skies filled with brightly colored wings as the colonists took their leisure in the air. I could almost smell the aroma of clover blooming, feel the moistness of the air after a rainfall, hear the rustle of rabbits in the undergrowth. “How far along are they in the machine shops?”

“Plumbing’s in.”

“Speaking of plumbing, where did the sewage treatment plant wind up? You never told me.”

Simon had very white teeth that gleamed against his unshaven chin when he grinned. “They kept shifting it around from village to village, each village kept saying Not In My Backyard. They haven’t even moved in yet and already they’re fighting.”

“So?”

“So we plumbed it into the biggest industrial complex.” He pointed. “They don’t want to live with it? Fine. They can work with it.”

“They’ll be furious when they find out.”

Simon shrugged. “Not our problem. It’s a turnkey operation. They move in, it’s theirs, and that means all of it, including the problems that came with their infighting.”

“You’re such a hardass, Simon.”

“True.”

“I like it.”

“I know.” He grinned again. Simon had been my second-in-command for so long, our understanding was pretty near perfect. Maybe even pretty good all right. “I’m heading down to Ops. You coming?”

“No, I’ve got to find Roger. The genetechs were having trouble cloning the maples out of the geodomes on Outpost; I want to see how he’s doing.”

“Okay, see you later.” With a lift of his hand he strode off. He tripped once and hopped three times in the low gravity before regaining his balance.

I found Roger mulching roots in a grove of saplings, each barely a self-respecting twig, although they looked healthy enough, and from little saplings did mighty maple trees grow. I hoped. “How’s it going, Roger? The maples coming along okay?”

“Of course,” he said, affronted that I would dare think otherwise.

“I’d heard there was some trouble with—” He looked at me, and I changed that to, “So, I take it there are no problems raising their nasty little heads in the biospherics department.”

His lip curled, and he bent back over his twig. “Piece of cake. Those engineers are meat-eaters to a man. They want green, all right, but just enough to fill a salad bowl and soften the edges of the architecture.”

“Glad to hear it,” I said, a little wary. It was not like Roger Lindbergh to be uncomplaining. “Did they decide they wanted cows?”

He snorted. “Not hardly. They’re not moving off-Terra to learn how to use a manure rake. Fixed-bed-enzyme milk’ll do fine for them.” He pointed with his dirty trowel. “We put in three of the FBE synthesizers, one per village, alongside the three meat vats. If all three are working, they run at half capacity. If one breaks down or needs maintenance, the other two take up the slack. Same with the mycoprotein vats.”

“I’ve always liked redundancy in a habitat.”

“Me, too.” He worked compost into the roots of the tree. “Star?”

“What?”

He sat back on his heels. “Zoya lost the baby.”

“Oh. Oh God.” I sat down next to him. “Roger, I’m so sorry.”

“Charlie doesn’t seem to be able to fix whatever’s wrong.” He ran his finger down the trowel’s edge, collecting a loose ball of the grayish dirt that had once been asteroidal pebble. He rubbed the grains between thumb and forefinger. “She says it could be the half gee on Outpost.” He raised his head, his expression bleak. “We’re going back to Terranova.”

“What!”

“On the next TL-M ferry. Kevin Takemotu’s reserved us berths.”

First Perry, then Roger. It was beginning to look like a general exodus. My response was instinctive, if less than compassionate. “Roger, you can’t leave. I don’t know what I’d do without you, I—”

His voice was thin but firm. “We want kids, Star. We’re willing to try anything until we get it right. You’ve got three of your own, you can’t possibly know how we feel.”

His shoulders were hunched, as if anticipating a blow. Roger was expecting me to argue with him, and it shamed me to realize he was right. I took a deep breath and said in a level voice, “You’re right, I can’t. You got a place to stay on Terranova?” He shook his head. “I’ve still got my house there. You need a place to bunk until you decide what you’re going to do—” I remembered. “Right. Dammit. I forgot. It’s halfway up the Rock Candy Mountains, in half-gee territory its own self. Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Thanks for the offer.”

He set aside the trowel, and I watched him level the earth around the sapling with possessive pats. He worked as he always did, as he had for the twenty years I’d known him, with complete absorption, devoted to the propagation of the color green in any shade, in any climate, on any world. Roger Lindbergh never looked more at home than when he was up to his elbows in dirt. “You don’t want to go, do you?” I said in sudden realization, and immediately cursed myself for my lack of tact.

He wouldn’t look at me. “Ben’s a good man. He’s up to speed on the AggroAccel program, and he’s been here on World One since we melted out an interior. He’ll do a good job with it.”

“Ben it is, then.” I leaned forward to rest one hand over his clenched, grubby ones. “I’ll miss you, Roger.”

“I’ll miss you, too, Star.”

We sat like that for a long time.

· · ·

The Ops center was a small, single-story building located at the World’s equator, where the gravity was a full gee. I found Simon sitting at a U-shaped console surrounded by a forest of card frames and many swearing technicians. Computer techs swear a lot, but always in whispers, as if they’re afraid the computer might hear them and in retaliation throw out another malf or glitch. “Sumbitch is a kludge,” Sally Humboldt hissed at Simon.