The Venus Belt (12 page)

I shrugged, trying to look as unreconstructably masculine as possible. “You’re the teacher. But I think there’s something wrong with this suit.” I pulled it off the hanger. “I’ve heard of underwear for the deaf, but this is ridiculous—shouldn’t it have a transparent face-plate or something, so I can see where I’m going?”

The chimpanzee grimaced with exasperation, then reached for the hood folded down on his chest. Unlike Koko’s suit and mine, his was lavishly d
e
corated in bright lavender and yellow swirls. He stretched the hood up over his face and fastened it at the nape, looking, minus some kind of cu
t
out for his mug, just like a featureless psychedelic story dummy. “You see, the su
r
face nanoprocessors pick up wave fronts, assemble and present them on the inside of the hood.” He pushed buttons on one of the complicated ke
y
boards running down each forearm. “Now I can see as well as you can. Better, because I’m making use of lovely ultraviolet, infrared and sound waves, x-rays, radio, you name it.”

The decorated surface of the hood whirled and changed. I was looking at his face! “Not really much point to this, you understand, it’s just my
i
m
age
you’re seeing, a simple trick of nanocircuitry. But actors on the Telecom
will
insist, and maybe that’s why you’ve never noticed the absence of a f
a
ceplate before. Now,
may
I get on with my class?” He fiddled with more arm bu
t
tons, his features distorting into those of Captain Spoonbill, forbi
d
ding stoic expression and all. “
And,
if you don’t let the lock full-cycle this time, Miss Featherstone-Haugh,
you’ll walk the plank!
”He dubbed in an eyepatch and gold earring, and hornpiped away.

I wound up using a lifeboat, as I’d been expected to suit up in my stat
e
room. When I was almost dressed, I looked down at Koko, who’d politely turned her back despite the six-inch hull between us. “Hey, amanuensess, this isn’t fair!”

I held my foot above the—what, gunwale?—where she could see it through the plastic canopy. It was covered with rubbery material, som
e
thing like fishing waders crossed with ballet slippers. Instead of feet in her suit, Koko—well, she had an extra pair of
gloves.
She turned, gri
n
ning. “That’s what you get for evolutionary overspecialization, Boss.” She stretched a foot out, fluidly wriggling her toes. I’d caught her that way once, playing our p
i
ano back home: Joplin’s “Easy Winners,” for godsake.

Under the last few days’ decreasing acceleration, my reflexes had b
e
come a bit uncertain. I climbed down carefully from the auxiliary craft and latched its bubble back in place. I was still unzipped, the garment open from my left hip to my right shoulder. “Quit practicing arpeggios and help me fasten this suit!”

“It’s ar
pig
gios, Boss. You know, This little piggy went to market, this’—Boss, what have you got
on
under there?”

I tried to smooth the lumps away. “Under where?”

“Underwear? That’s what I
thought!
That means you didn’t hook up the catheter and the—”

“God, do I
have
to?” Those extra inner fixtures had resembled the i
n
timidating appliances they advertise in the back pages of
Hustler
.

“Gonna get pretty uncomfortable, otherwise. Besides, you’re mixing up the sensor system—see those little red telltales on your forearm panels? Boss, it doesn’t hurt or anything, you’ll get used to it.”

“That’s what the proctologist said. Well, back to the lifeboat, then. You’re
sure
we’re really going to be suited up that long?” Rejecting her rude offers of assistance, I deposited my shorts with the rest of my earthly duds on the seat of the tiny spaceship, got myself resuited, and strapped Olongo’s Webley back around my middle where it barely balanced the enormous knife hanging on the other side. I missed my leather gunbelt, too, though admittedly, any mildly hard vacuum would have reduced it to a dry cru
m
bling powder in a very few minutes.

“Catheter and—” or not, smartsuits don’t actually take that much ge
t
ting used to. They seal shut with a brush of the hand, warning the wearer with a number of idiot lights and buzzers if he manages to louse up even this simple procedure. I didn’t hear or see any warnings—in fact, with the da
r
kened inner surface of the hood resting only half an inch from my nose, I couldn’t see at all, until I felt Koko jabbing buttons on my arm. When v
i
sion returned, it was as if the hood weren’t there at all.

For damage-proof redundancy and the occasional left-hander, each panel of controls is duplicated on the other arm. They’re mostly for minor adjustments which don’t override the safer, automated life-support fun
c
tions of the suit. And they looked so much like concertina ivories, I was tempted to puzzle out “Lady of Spain.”

Koko tucked me in all over, an embarrassingly intimate process rem
i
niscent of having your inseam measured by a tailor, making sure the fabric co
n
tacted every metric inch of my body. Then we did some careful low-gee bending and stretching to double-check the fit. The freedom and comfort the suit allowed was simply unbelievable. To tell the truth, I felt downright naked, which is how I was supposed to feel, a testimony to the manufactu
r
er’s art.

Cautiously she took me through a checklist of the controls. The v
a
riety of visual input alone was astounding; our instructor hadn’t exaggerated. I
m
ages of our surroundings, life-support and other data, even the correct time, appeared and disappeared at the touch of a key, arrayed in bo
r
der-hugging panels around the field of view, or in multimedia boxes like a TV split-screen display. At one point I discovered I was three feet tall and, even without benefit of runny nose and smelly feet, built u
p
side-down.

“Now you’re seeing with your fingers, Boss,” Koko explained. “Hold them up.”

It was like looking through a periscope. I fumbled over to the lifeboat and poked a pinky under the hatch. Sure enough, there were my baggy pants and poncho crumpled on the pilot’s seat. “Nifty. Now how about putting my eyes back where they belong?”

We spent the next couple of hours showing me how to do things like that for myself. Radar, sonar, stereo, back-scratching flagellae, and waste-disposal. She’d been right about the biological functions—the suit took care of those, storing the somewhat disgusting residue and recirc
u
lating water and oxygen. I was unwilling to experiment, but Koko assured me you could even throw up in a smartsuit with minimal discomfort.

After a while, we cycled out through the lock and into the cargo bay, Koko so impatient she overrode the outer door with a
whoosh!
that threa
t
ened to set me on my fundament. Hanging outside were ropes, ladders, swings, a jungle gym, and various other hardware for risking the integrity of your suit.

“Koko?” Wishing I had interrupted our ground-school indoors for a smoke, I watched her climb a wall under our locally decreasing gravity, u
s
ing sticky pads she’d activated on her hands and knees.

“What, Boss?” Abruptly Koko’s face appeared in a lower corner of my view field.

“That’s pretty neat.” I diddled with my forearms until she was r
e
ceiving a similar picture of me. “Now what was it I wanted—oh, yeah; how long are we going to be out here? Even with recycling, these rubber leotards can’t hold much—
Careful!
”

She sprang clear of the wall, executed a double backward somersault, and landed lightly on the deck. “Get some
exercise
,
Boss, don’t just stand around. And you’ve got plenty of air. Everything with oxygen in it gets br
o
ken down, in addition to which, the suit is one big sandwich, lots of layers, millions of tiny, selectively permeable microtanks. Just like the beads in that—that red-tape whatchacallit you were telling me about?”

“NCR paper? But how much air could that—”

“At a couple thousand tons per square— Boss, you’ve got to be ki
d
ding.”

No wonder it was so damned hard to puncture a smartsuit. Half its su
b
stance was semiconductors, and the other half, microscopic vacuoles pumped rigid with consumables. I jogged in place, then along one wall and back again, reluctant to imitate Koko’s advanced gymnastics; it was hard enough just waiting for my feet to touch the deck again between steps. F
i
nally, I parked it on that selfsame deck, observing the rest of the class a football field away, doing their own thing. With sufficient magnification, it seemed like I was there among them. As the light threatened to grow di
m
mer with enlargement, the area my suit was using for vision automatically expanded beyond the face, until my forearms blurred the bottom of the screen. A little practice, and I discovered I could sit there and scan the wall behind me—eyes literally in the back of my head.

And then the deck below—hindsight, already!

But before too long I began tiring of my new toys, and found myself wondering where Clarissa was, hoping miserably that she was all right. What could have happened to her? Had she gone wherever Olongo, L
u
cy, and Ed were? Had they all gone the same place, for that matter? Were Deejay and Ooloorie
really
traveling to Mercury? I’d tried to find out, only to be told that communications sunward were being bollixed up by solar flares.

Clarissa!
I slammed a helpless fist into the titanium decking. What the
hell
was I doing here, playing space cadet in a suit I’d never have any pract
i
cal use for? Why wasn’t I
doing
something? Why couldn’t they just stop this tub and let me off? I don’t know how many miserable minutes passed. I
n
credibly, I caught my chin in mid-nod toward my chest.

“Win...
Boss?
”
Someone in a decorated smartsuit stood lightly beside Koko, his features repeated in an inset on my screen next to hers.

“Hunh? Oh—sorry, guess I got lost in there somewhere.”

“Boss, this is Mr. Camillus. Mike Morrison sent him.”

I stood up. Morrison was turning into a regular guardian angel. The fe
l
low walked over and extended a hand. “Gerber Camillus—call me Gerb—stunt coordinator for Mike’s new picture,
Revenge of the Thrint
.
Mike said no offense, but maybe you could use some pointers with a blade?” His other hand held a pair of floppy movie knives. I looked him over as much as his suit allowed, a wiry figure, small, but not a chimp—his shoes didn’t have fingers. They were decorated, though, like the rest of his suit: black, with mock red cummerbund and sash, white frilly shirtfront and satin tie. To this he’d tacked on a pair of rubbery tails, and, to top the whole e
n
semble off, a tall “silk” hat above his face-display.

It made me feel even more naked. “Yeah, I guess I could stand a lesson or ten. But not now, I’m right in the middle of a—”

“
Nap
,” finished Koko. “Getting comfy with a suit real fast, aren’t you?” She glanced at my forearm displays and made a few adjustments. “Oh, I see. If you’re going to fret yourself to death, Boss, then override your medic
a
tion circuits—see, like this. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself being electr
o
tranked again.” As she lectured, we noticed that the other students were filing back through the lock.

“I guess class is over for today. Not too sure I like this automatic med
i
cation jazz. You sure I’ll be all right, now?”

Koko nodded.

“Then let’s get started,” suggested Camillus. “Mike said you were doing some weird kind of hand-to-hand fighting up in the bar.”

“Tae Kwon Do,” I replied. “Green Belt, though I haven’t been working out regularly for a while. Camillus bobbed his head, not unde
r
standing a single word. As with the idea of concealed weapons, there’d never been any need in the Confederacy for unarmed combat—nobody was ever unarmed! Also, under a more enlightened North American fo
r
eign policy, Japan had remained self-isolated until the 1950s. My dete
c
tive business had been a little thin at first, and I’d fattened it up giving elementary Korean martial arts instruction. I’d been a Gold Belt, a virtual beginner myself, and after a few bonafide masters from the U.S. and K
o
rea set up real
dochangs,
I’d quit to become a student once again.