Red Planet Run (6 page)

“Couldn’t find its way out of a silicon chip with ten megs and a flashlight,” Will Noble muttered behind her, and a chorus of angry whispers agreed.

“Now, now,” Simon said jovially, “another terabyte or two’s worth of storage in the self-correcting program, and this problem will”—he grinned—“self-correct.” There was a battery of raspberries and boos, and Simon’s grin widened. Simon Turgenev up to his ears in megachips and data cards and actively hostile computer techs was a happy man.

Hung from the frame next to Sally was a length of wiring looped into a hangman’s noose. “What’s this?” I asked her, pointing at it.

She exchanged glances with Will, and following her gaze, I noticed a small plastic skull hanging from his keyboard. I looked around the room, and next to each programmer found other nooses and skulls, several miniature skeletons, some dressed in colorful costumes, and one tiny coffin.

In spite of myself, my imagination conjured up a picture of that little coffin tucked into the ground, consigning into the hereafter one or another of the various body parts we had found scattered across Ceres’ landing field the week before. It would have been just the right size for some of them.

I shook myself. Those pitiful remnants, the shredded spoor of a pack of bloodthirsty killers, had gone the way of all flesh in the Belt, into the waste recycler on Ceres long since, days since, ages since. I was proud my voice was steady. “What the hell is this, guys?” A thought occurred. “It’s not October already, is it?”

Will looked at Sally, who had her eyes fixed on the light-pen in her hands. “They remind us,” he said softly.

“Remind you of what? Trick or Treat?”

He looked at me, his face solemn. “It reminds us of what happens if we leave a gate closed that should have been open.”

“Or install a defective card,” Sally said.

“Or give the software the right command at the wrong time,” Bill York said, looking up from a keyboard.

I looked at the little skull with its little leer, and could find nothing to say.

“How’d the monitor program on the life support systems prove out?” Simon said.

“Five by,” Sally said, albeit grudgingly, her voice rising up all the way to a mumble. “We threw a simulated atmospheric leak at it up near the North Pole. The diagnostic program located the leak and had a repair team on the scene in fifteen minutes.”

“Good, good; that’s what I like to hear, my brilliantly conceived, superbly written habitat programs functioning at optimum capacity.” Simon flicked a few switches, pressed a button or two, and rose to his feet. “Keep up the good fight until 1400, children, when shall we gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river. I love you, too,” he said blandly, in the teeth of another barrage of curses.

Outside, I said, “I’m glad you’re springing them for the ceremony. Maybe it’ll cheer them up a little.”

“Cheer them up?” Simon looked at me askance. “That’s the best mood I’ve seen those byteheads in since Outpost put on spin.”

Computer technicians, like architects, are another race altogether.

Halfway down to the dedication site we spotted Mother. She was with Roberta. They were arguing. Roberta looked stubborn. Mother looked patient. “I don’t suppose there’s any way of avoiding them,” I said.

Simon gazed around the mostly bare circumference of World One. “Nope.”

“I didn’t think so.” I braced myself and marched forward.

“Roberta, dear, I’ve identified and catalogued the recreational habits of each future colonist, and none of them has demonstrated any interest in running the rapids.”

“Natasha, it’s a matter of what the world should have.”

“As opposed to what its inhabitants want? Really, dear, what’s the point in constructing—Oh hello, Simon. Esther, dear, Roberta seems to think—”

Why was it, that by simply calling me by my birth name, my mother was the only person in the Solar System who could make me feel like I was back in braces? “That’s Roberta’s problem, Mother—thinking.” I grinned at Roberta. She didn’t grin back.

We came to a stop at the river’s edge. The water in it was as yet only a few centimeters deep, mud-colored and sluggish. It was four meters from bank to bank; the channel was as much as two meters deep where the banks had been built up. I turned my head, following its course as the sphere curved up around us on either side, to meet eventually far above our heads. “It looks great, Roberta. Just like a river, and in fact, just like the picture of the river the engineers sent us. You done good.”

Roberta stared off into the distance, her expression sour. I was tired of coddling her. I moved to where she couldn’t avoid looking at me full on. “Roberta, it’s a done deal. We’re not putting the distillers on hold so you can reroute the channel or throw in some boulders to change its course. The engineers are happy with it, which means I’m happy with it, which means your job here is done. I want to see the preliminary blueprints of your designs for single-family housing in Village Two by next week. Okay?”

It wasn’t. Three hours later Roberta still wasn’t speaking to me as we stood in a crowd numbering all of the original shipmates of the
Hokuwa’a
and
Voortrekker
who could be spared from either their duties or the Ceresian flu. A small procession approached us, headed proudly by John Begaye and Maggie Lu. Roger was standing directly behind me and I caught the full force of his squawk on the back of my neck. “Where’d they get that tree? Star! Do you see that? Where’d they get that goddam tree?”

Zoya murmured something soothing. Next to me I could feel Simon begin to shake. “Star?” Maggie called, and I went gladly.

The tree was an eight-year-old hemlock, sturdy and thick, with healthy blue-green needles and purple cones. I kept one wary eye on a red-faced, furious Roger as it was brought forward to the river’s edge. I steadied the tree as the members of the procession joined the crowd facing me.

I waited for the last whisper to die away. An expectant silence echoed off the inside of the sphere. Into it, I said, “Walt Whitman says that a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars.”

I smiled at the crowd, meeting Charlie’s eyes for an instant. “I guess that makes us the stars’ journeymen.

“But World One is much more than a leaf of grass.

“It is an entire new world.

“It is the first space habitat conceived, financed, and constructed out of Terran orbit.

“It’s a world where a group of people of shared beliefs, professions, and lifestyles will come together to live, and grow, and prosper in harmony.

“This World is the culmination of a dream that began long ago and worlds away, in the minds of a few, visionary dreamers, back in the days when Terrans didn’t even have a reliable space transportation system, or the funds, or a bureaucratic structure to support the research and development for space travel, much less the construction of habitats and their colonization. The journey has been long, and difficult, and, for some of us”—my voice did not falter— “our last.

“Today, at journey’s end, we pay tribute. To the dream, and to the dreamers.”

I gestured towards the tree. “It has been the tradition of Terran builders for centuries that when the frame of a house is complete, they nail a tree to the ridgepole. World One has no ridgepole, and I’m not about to start driving nails through living trees when I know for a fact Roger Lindbergh would eviscerate me if I did.” There was a ripple of smothered laughter in which Roger did not join. Zoya patted his arm.

“So today, here, now, begins our own adaptation of that continuing tradition. This tree comes from Central Park on Outpost.” I heard a sound that I was pretty sure was Roger’s teeth grinding together. “Archy and I have been looking into its genealogy, and from what we can discover, it is the offshoot of a hemlock planted in the Big Rock Candy Mountains on Terranova. That tree was seeded from a grove of mountain hemlocks in the Chugach National Forest in Alaska.”

Settling the tree into the hole already dug for it, I filled in the hole, tamping the earth down around the little tree’s roots. When I was finished, I stuck the shovel into the ground and stood back. “From Terra to Terranova to Outpost to World One,” I intoned. “From the tree comes the wood.”

“And the wood returns to the tree,” they responded.

“Okay, Archy,” I murmured into my commset.

Somewhere outside, a set of computer-driven waldoes made a final, minuscule adjustment. The last reflecting mirror was brought into line, and through the ring of tropical graphplex windows the World’s first ray of sunlight slipped shyly inside, to glint off the motes of construction dust that danced through the air of the sphere, to cause the muddy ripples of the shallow (and still straight) river to gleam with a life of their own, to warmly caress our upturned faces. I looked down at the little tree, which, even as I watched, seemed to dig in its roots and shake out its limbs, the better to bask proudly in our approval and that first virgin ray of light.

There was a brief, sunstruck silence, followed by a thunderous, rolling wave of applause. The cheers from the crowd echoed across the equator, cheers for the little tree, cheers for the New World’s christening by sunlight, but cheers most of all for themselves, and for the culmination of a dream.

· · ·

Back on Outpost that evening, there was a smaller, more intimate, and infinitely more personal ceremony. Jammed into Charlie and Simon’s living room were Charlie and Simon, Alexei, Axenia, Mother, Crip, and Paddy and Sean, looking so innocent I was immediately suspicious. With an agility that alarmed me as much as it awed me, they had managed to avoid, avert, deter, deflect, and duck any and all explanation of last week’s presence in the train of Brother Moses’ demonstration. I considered warning him, but I didn’t know of what, and so left it for another day. A mistake, as it later turned out, but contrary to public opinion, I was only human.

Maggie Lu was there, as were Roger, Zoya, John Begaye, Helen, and Ari, Perry Austin attended by the Smith triplets (who filled up half the room all by themselves), and a slender young brunette with tilted hazel eyes and a shy smile, whom I did not know. Leif stood next to her, clasping her hand in his. I opened my mouth to say something, for example, Who are you? and, Why are you and my son holding hands? when there was a stir at the other end of the room. Mother produced a large box. I knew instantly what was inside.

So did Charlie. “Mother! You brought the candle with you?”

“Certainly I did, Carlotta,” Mother said, austere and reproving. “If you will persist in dragging your family millions of kilometers from your native home, someone has to see to it that certain essential traditions accompany the family.”

Charlie rolled her eyes at me as Simon fetched a small round-topped table on a slender base of leaf-shaped legs. He placed it in the center of the room and spread it with a white cloth. Mother opened the box and took out a piece of translucent green soapstone, short and squat and carved in the stylized likeness of a sea otter, after the fashion of Alaska Native artists. It floated flat on its back with its paws in the air.

She centered the carving on the table, and between its paws placed Esther’s candle, an equally squat, barrel-shaped taper some twenty centimeters high and twice that in diameter. The otter alone must have weighed five kays. Like Charlie, I had trouble believing Mother had lugged it and the candle all the way from Terra.

Between them, Crip and Simon brought forward a large, square, shallow tray and set it on the floor before the candle, filled with what appeared to be wet sand.

Mother smiled at us. “It is the custom for the youngest member of the family to light Esther’s candle. Axenia?”

Charlie and Simon’s third child came forward, chubby ten-year-old face puckered in concentration. A long, thin match—especially constructed by Outpost’s openly incredulous prefab shop; there is no such thing as an open flame on a space station—was struck, and flared into life. The wick caught at once. The translucent wax began to glow, and the soapstone base with it, so that together they gleamed like a bowlful of pale Arctic sunlight.

“Please be seated.” Mother curled up on the floor, Esther’s candle behind her and the tray of damp sand before her. The rest of us settled into a circle at the edge of the candlelight. Leif smiled at the young brunette and released her hand to sit at our center, across the tray from Mother.

Slowly, ceremoniously, Mother drew the storyknife from a leather sheath stained and fragile with age, and held it high for us to see.

The ivory of the storyknife was yellowed with the patina of three hundred years’ use. It was the size and shape of a small scimitar, thirty centimeters in length. The underside of the handle bore a row of tiny carved figures—a sun, a whale, an eagle, a salmon, a drum and, of course, the sea otter. Mother’s totem, Charlie’s, mine. Leif’s totem, too, after tonight.

In the wet sand, with the point of the storyknife, Mother drew a house. “My family,” Mother began, and the mere sound of that familiar invocation in the dim, flickering light was enough to transport me back in time to my own naming, so far away, so long ago. It was the last naming the family had held. Elizabeth, Charlie and Simon’s first child, was only ten when she left, and had never had one.

“My family,” Mother repeated, and drew a path from the front door of the house. “Good friends. Leif.” She gave him a look both solemn and kind. “For three hundred years it has been the custom of this family that, in the year of their choosing, each child decide on the surname by which ever after they will be known.”

“This custom was begun by Ekaterina Shugak, my great-great-great-grandmother.” Mother drew the rounded symbol for woman next to the path. “She was born a Medvedev, which was her Russian father’s name and her name at birth, as was the custom of the time. When Soloviev killed her brother and her uncle in the massacre of Umnak Island in 1766”—Mother drew two triangular male symbols and the X next to each that signified sleep or death—“Ekaterina repudiated her Russian husband, and with her three children”—the tip of the storyknife moved deftly, and three child symbols appeared, two male and one female—“boarded a kayak”—a single stroke, and the curved hull of a kayak appeared—“and paddled across twelve hundred miles of the most treacherous seas on Terra”—three wavy lines, one on top of the other, materialized beneath the kayak—“to Old Harbor, a village on Kodiak Island.”