The Sam Gunn Omnibus (77 page)

“What’s wrong?” Sam was at my side
in a shot. “Cripes, you look like you’re gonna explode! You’re red as a fire
engine.”

I
was so furious I could
hardly see. I handed the letter to Sam and managed to choke out, “Does this mean
what I think it means?”

He scanned the letter quickly, then
read it more slowly, his eyes going wider with each word of it.

“Jesus Christ on a crutch!” he
shouted. “They’re throwing you off the asteroid!”

I
could not believe
what the letter said. We both read it half a dozen times more. The words did
not change their meaning. I wanted to scream. I wanted to kill. The vision came
to my mind of lawyers stripped naked and staked out over a slow fire, screaming
for mercy while I laughed and burned their letter in the fire that was roasting
their flesh. I looked around the command module wildly, looking for something
to throw, something to break, anything to release the terrible, terrible fury
that was building inside me.

“Those sons of bitches!” Sam raged.
“Those slimy do-gooder bastards!”

The lawyers represented the
Moralist Sect of The One True God, Inc. The letter was to inform me that the
Moralists had notified the International Astronautical Authority that they
intended to capture asteroid Aten 2004 EA and use it as structural material for
the habitat they were building.

“They can’t do that!” Sam bellowed,
bouncing around the bridge like a weightless Ping-Pong ball. “You were there
first. They can’t throw you out like a landlord evicting a tenant!”

“The white man has taken the Indian’s
lands whenever he chose to,” I said, seething.

He mistook my deathly quiet tone
for acquiescence. “Not anymore! Not today. This is one white man who’s on the
side of the redskins.”

He was so upset, so outraged, so
vociferous that I felt my own fury cooling, calming. It was as if Sam was doing
all my screaming for me.

“This letter,” I hissed, “says I have
no choice.”

“Hell no, you won’t go,” Sam
snapped. “I’ve got lawyers too, lady. Nobody’s going to push you around.”

“Why should you want to involve
yourself?”

He shot me an unfathomable glance. “I’m
involved. I’m involved. You think I can sit back and watch those Moralist
bastards steal your rock? I
hate
it when some big outfit
tries to muscle us little guys.”

It occurred to me that at least
part of Sam’s motivation might have been to worm his way into my affection. And
my pants. He would act the brave protector of the weak, and I would act the
grateful weakling who would reward him with my somewhat emaciated body. From
the few words that the taciturn biologist had said at dinner, and from my
observation of Sam’s own behavior, it seemed to me that he had a Casanova
complex: he wanted every woman he saw.

And yet—his outrage seemed genuine
enough. And yet—the instant he saw me he said I was beautiful, even though
clearly I was not.

“Don’t you worry,” Sam said, his
round little face grim and determined. “I’m on your side and we’ll figure out
some way to stick this letter up those lawyers’ large intestines.”

“But the Moralist Sect is very
powerful.”

“So what? You’ve got me, kiddo. All
those poor praying sonsofbitches have on their side is God.”

I
was still angry
and confused as Sam and I climbed back into our space suits and he returned me
to my pod on my—no,
the
asteroid. I felt a burning
fury blazing within me, bitter rage at the idea of stealing my
as
teroid away from me. They were going to break it up
and use it as raw material for their habitat!

Normally I would have been
screaming and throwing things, but I sat quietly on the two-person scooter as
we left the airlock of Sam’s ship. He was babbling away with a mixture of
bravado, jokes, obscene descriptions of lawyers in general and Moralists in
particular. He made me laugh. Despite my fears and my fury, Sam made me laugh and
realize that there was nothing I could do about the Moralists and their lawyers
at the moment, so why should I tie myself into knots over them? Besides, I had
a more immediate problem to deal with.

Sam. Was he going to attempt to
seduce me once we were back at my quarters? And if he did, what would my
reaction be? I was shocked at my uncertainty. Three years is a long time, but
to even think of allowing this m
an ...

“You got a lawyer?” His voice came
through the earphones of my helmet.

“No. I suppose the university will
represent me. Legally, I’m their employee.”

“Maybe, but
you...”
His voice choked off. I heard him take in his breath, like a man who has just
seen something that overpowered him.

“Is that it?” Sam asked in an awed
voice.

The Sun was shining obliquely on
The Rememberer, so that the figures I had carved were shown in high relief.

“It’s not finished,” I said. “It’s
hardly even begun.”

Sam swerved the little scooter so
that we moved slowly along the length of the carvings. I saw all the problems,
the places that had to be fixed, improved. The feathered serpent needed more
work. The Mama Ki
l
ya, the Moon Mother,
was especially rough. But I had to place her there because the vein of silver
in the asteroid came up to the surface only at that point and I needed to use
the silver as the tears of the Moon.

Even while I picked out the weak
places in my figures I could hear Sam’s breathing over the suit radio. I feared
he would hyperventilate. For nearly half an hour we cruised slowly back and
forth across the face of the asteroid, then spiraled around to the other side.
-

The one enormous advantage of space
sculpture, of course, is the absence of gravity. There is no need for a base, a
stand, a vertical line. Sculpture can be truly three-dimensional in space, as
it was meant to be. I had intended to carve the entire surface of the asteroid.

“It’s fantastic,” Sam said at last,
his voice strangely muted. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I’ll
be hung by the
cojones
before I’ll let those double-talking bastards steal this away from you!”

At that moment I began to love Sam
Gunn.

TRUE TO HIS
word, Sam got his own lawyers to
represent me. A few days after
Adam Smith
disappeared from my view, on its way to the Moralists’ construction site, I was
contacted by the firm of Whalen and Krill, of Port Canaveral, Florida, USA, Earth.

The woman who appeared on my comm
screen was a junior partner in the firm. I was not important enough for either
of the two senior men. Still, that was better than my university had done:
their legal counsel had told me bleakly that I had no recourse at all and I should
abandon my asteroid forthwith.

“We’ve gotten the IAA arbitration
board to agree to take up the dispute,” said Ms. Mindy Rourke, Esq. She seemed
very young to me to be a lawyer. I was especially fascinated by her long hair
falling luxuriantly past her shoulders. She could only wear it like that on
Earth. In a low-gee environment it would have spread out like a
chestnut-colored explosion.

“I’ll have my day in court, then.”

“You won’t have to be physically
present,” Ms. Rourke said. Then she added, with a doubtful little frown, “But I’m
afraid the board usually bases its decisions on the maximum good for the maximum
number of people. The Moralists will house ten thousand people in their
habitat. All you’ve got is you.”

What she meant was that Art counted
for nothing compared to the utilitarian purpose of grinding up my asteroid,
smelting
it,
and using its metals as
structural materials for an artificial world to house ten thousand religious
zealots who want to leave Earth forever.

Sam stayed in touch with me
electronically, and hardly a day passed that he did not call and spend an hour
or more chatting with me. Our talk was never romantic, but each call made me
love him more. He spoke endlessly about his childhood in Nebraska, or was it
Baltimore? Sometimes his childhood tales were based in the rainy hillsides of
the Pacific Northwest. Either he moved around ceaselessly as a child or he was
amalgamating tales from many other people and adopting them as his own. I never
tried to find out. If Sam thought of the stories as his own childhood, what did
it matter?

Gradually, as the weeks slipped
into months, I found myself speaking about my own younger years. The
half-deserted mountain village where I had been born. The struggle to get my
father to allow me to go to the university instead of marrying, “as a decent
girl should.” The professor who broke my heart. The pain that sent me fleeing
to this asteroid and the life of a hermit.

Sam cheered me up. He made me
smile, even laugh. He provided me with a blow-by-blow description of his own
activities as an entrepreneur. Not content with owning and operating the Earth
View Hotel
and
running a
freight-hauling business that ranged from low Earth orbit to the Moon and out
as far as the new habitats being built in Sun-circling orbits, Sam was also
getting involved in building tourist facilities at Moonbase as well.

“And then there’s this advertising
scheme that these two guys have come up with. It’s kinda crazy, but it might
work.”

The “scheme” was to paint enormous
advertisement pictures in the ionosphere, some fifty miles or so above the
Earth’s surface, using electron guns to make the gases up at that altitude glow
like the aurora borea
l
is. The men that
Sam was speaking with claimed that they could make actual pictures that could
be seen across whole continents.

“When the conditions are right,”
Sam added. “Like, it’s gotta be either at dusk or at dawn, when the sky looks
dark from the ground but there’s still sunlight up at the right altitude.”

“Not many people are up at dawn,” I
said.

It took almost a full minute
between my statement and his answer, I was so distant from his base in Earth
orbit.

“Yeah,” he responded at last. “So
it’s gotta be around dusk.” Sam grinned lopsidedly. “Can you imagine the
reaction from the environmentalists if we start painting advertisements across
the sky?”

“They’ll fade away within a few minutes,
won’t they?”

The seconds stretched, and then he
answered, “Yeah, sure. But can you picture the look on their faces? They’ll
hate
it! Might be worth doing just to give ‘em ulcers!”

All during those long weeks and months
I could hardly work up the energy to continue my carving. What good would it
be? The whole asteroid was going to be taken away from me, ground into powder,
destroyed forever. I knew what the International Astronautical Authority’s
arbitrators would say: Moralists, ten thousand;
Art,
one.

For days on end I would stand at my
console, idly fingering the keyboard, sketching in the next set of figures that
the lasers would etch into the stone. In the display screen the figures would
look weak, misshapen, distorted. Sometimes they glared at me accusingly, as if
I was the one killing them.

Time and again I ended up sketching
Sam’s funny, freckled, dear face.

I
found reasons to
pull on my space suit and go outside. Check the lasers. Adjust the power
settings. Recalibrate the feedback sensors. Anything but actual work. I ran my
gloved fingers across the faces of the
hauqui,
the guardian spirits I had carved into this metallic
stone. It was a bitter joke. The
hauqui
needed
someone to guard them from evil.

Instead of working, I cried. All my
anger and hate was leaching away in the acid of frustration and waiting,
waiting, endless months of waiting for the inevitable doom.

And then Sam showed up again, just
as unexpectedly as the first time.

My asteroid, with me attached to
it,
had moved far along on
its
yearly orbit. I could
see Earth only through the low-power telescope that I had brought with me, back
in those first days when I had fooled myself into believing I would spend my
free time in space studying the stars. Even in the telescope the world of my
birth was nothing more than a blurry fat crescent, shining royal-blue.