The Venus Belt (13 page)

And slacked off about twenty-five pounds ago.

Camillus led us back upstairs to a gym. Koko watched a while, then made excuses lamely and departed. “Doctor’s appointment,” I guessed. G
o
rillas don’t really need much in the way of training for fisticuffs, an
y
way—they just break their opponents in half and tie knots in what’s left.

Starting with a number of fencing and karate stances, we walked through variations allowing for the use of the big heavy choppers co
m
mon in the asteroids. Mine was typical enough, as was Gerb’s, a double-edged fourteen-inch
snickersnee.
We sparred with his toy replicas, however. He showed me a swell trick with a smartsuit, adjusting the surface so the pre
s
sure of a blow leaves a visible mark in simulated gory crimson—no arg
u
ments whether a touch has really been scored.

But the main thing I learned in that first afternoon was that, all these years, I’d been holding my Rezin upside-down, rather like a kitchen knife, thumb overlapping my fingers in what’s contemptuously termed a “hatchet grip.” Gerber demonstrated how the short back “clipped” edge is for hac
k
ing arms and shoulders, and to protect you from the other fe
l
low’s blade. The main, “lower” edge is carried upward, thumb behind the quillon like a saber, the long razor-curve slicing into the opponent’s belly clear up to the sternum.

No two ways about it, self-defense is just plain
messy
.

I divided the rest of the trip between smartsuit lessons and sword-fighting, with a little target practice on the side. Tactically, the pistol
is
a sword, most effective at a sword’s distance, intended for the same pr
i
marily defensive purpose, personal protection, rather than as a military or political instrument (one reason
rifles
are scarce in the Conf
e
deracy, and why they’re so conveniently immune to political attack in the United States). And, like a sword, a pistol comes to possess for its bearer a unique personality all its own, almost symbiotic with the personality it defends. Say what you will about the mystique of cutlery, the civilized individual’s
edge
is the handgun.

The Webley’s new sights were perfect, a big square notch in back, a big square post on a ramp up front, coarse and quick-to-center, just like my old S & W. Captain Forsyth’s extra ammunition came in mighty handy—I sure as hell needed the practice. I also decided to hang on to the little Bauer .25. In an emergency, it’d be better than
no
gun. But not much.

The
Bonaventura
passed its turnover point (which I spent snugly strapped to a barstool), and continued roaring along backward through the cosmos, acceleration dropping steadily until I was grateful for the heavy padding on the ceilings: I weighed about twenty pounds at the end of the journey, easy weight to throw around with muscles built for ten times that amount.

All the better to smash your head in.

***

Seen from space, Ceres is enough to convince you that the
Bonave
n
tura
is a big, expensive fraud. The asteroid shows up as a swirly blue-and-white marble shining in the void, occasional patches of dry land peeking through the clouds, exactly like
Terra Firma
.

“
What the hell?
”
I was lounging at a window in the 790-level bar, watc
h
ing my assistant sipping from a freefall plastic baggie.

“What the hell are you
what-the-helling
about now, Boss?”

I shook my head. “I’ve been staring at that blasted rock out there half an hour, trying to figure out what’s wrong. Koko,
real
planets don’t have long
i
tude and latitude lines!” I held a short cigar stub near an ash tray and let the suction carry it away.

She giggled. “Yeah, that’s what it looks like. Panels in the atmospheric envelope, that’s all.” A pretzel got away from her. She snagged it from the air and chomped it down.

“You mean there’s a
big plastic bag
around the entire—”

“And every section is just one enormous molecule, holding in the air and straining out excess ultraviolet. Icarus would bump his head long b
e
fore his wax started to soften.” The
Bonaventura
slowly spiraled around the mini
a
ture globe, aiming for Gunter’s Landing on the north pole, the barten
d
ers spending a final precious hour nailing down anything that was floating loose.

Ceres is green enough to satisfy her mythological namesake, inte
r
rupted everywhere by thousands of perfectly circular lakes, a legacy of countless prehistoric collisions. At least I
hoped
they were prehistoric. As the ship swung inward toward the planetoid, it lit up like a titanic Jap
a
nese lantern, the “night” side hardly an f-stop darker. I’d been keeping half an eye on the Telecom screen, where Captain Spoonbill was giving a guided tour. Now the electronic point of view swiveled from the asteroid to a dozen giant thin-film plastic mirrors hanging in orbit, trained on the surface below.

Book-type facts don’t do it for me, somehow. I knew the miniplanet was a “mere” six hundred and twenty miles in diameter, though there was nothing out the window to give me any real perspective. The Gigacom’s built-in
Encyclopedia of North America
states that Ceres has about the same surface area as India—a hell of a lot of real estate most astronomers back in the States are overlooking as “insignificant.”

The acceleration warning hooted and the planetoid dipped crazily, se
t
ting below the windowframe. Then it rose again all around us, the Telecom displaying an enormous, brightly lighted bull’s-eye beneath the ship. There was a
bump
.

We were down.

***

Ceres is a big, round refutation to the argument that massive projects like dams or highways are too big for little old private enterprise (funny how the Post Office always has to enforce its “natural” monopoly at gu
n
point), or that some “necessary” services can’t easily be denied to those unwilling to pay and therefore (this is where the steamroller was headed all along, of course) they should be provided “free” by the State.

Hell,
American
corporations—many of which gross better yearly than three-quarters of the
Duck Soup
republics in the U.N.—could stack the py
r
amids up all over again; Confederate companies run smaller, and they
do
build dams and highways—though they aren’t free to steal the wher
e
withal, an ethical consideration that somehow misses registering on a
d
vocates of
government
construction.

We have only one “telephone” at home, but it receives calls from tho
u
sands of companies, and delivers the mail, too; parcels arrive via a pneuma
t
ic system Edward Bellamy would envy. Cheyenne Ridge controls the weat
h
er as a by-product of the highly competitive po
w
er-generation business, strictly for PR. If you don’t like the flavor they serve, you can either move or have your own climate dropped in—as long as you don’t clutter up the neig
h
bors’ lawns.

Free riders? Well, suppose you want a streetlight: you either pay for it yourself or get the neighbors to chip in. If one or two surly curmudgeons refuse, well, what’s more important, forcing old man Carruthers to cough up his negligible share, or getting the streetlight you wanted? Most likely the old bastard’ll demand you keep your crummy photons off
his
prope
r
ty!

Ceres was developed by the same outfit that runs the
Bonaventura
:
Ha
r
riman, Taggart
&
Hill. In a daring stroke of capitalism, they org
a
nized a transport service to the asteroids, ignoring nit-pickers who pointed out that there wasn’t anyone out there to run a service
to
.
Staking a claim on Ceres, H T & H modified its orbit, erected the plastic envelope, and offered
hom
e
stead
tickets on ships like the
Indomitable Sp
i
rit
. Utilities, like atmosphere and mirrors, they sold to other clients, as concessions. The question of who governs never arises: back home we’re stuck with what’s left of a Congress. Here, where everybody ran his own life from the start, there isn’t even an
y
thing to
vote
on.

Bonaventura
was sitting in an enormous crater surrounded by a mou
n
tainous wall. “Gunter’s Landing,” my apprentice chattered brightly, “ten miles across, a duplicate of Port Piazzi, way down south.”

“Right,” I answered, zipping up my smartsuit to the collar, “where they have the Leaning Tower. Convenient, having craters right where they’re needed.”

“Boss, they just kicked the whole planet around until this pair of cr
a
ters
were
the poles. And I’m going to remember that Leaning Tower r
e
mark.”

The crater walls described the limits of the airless port; their
outer
slopes served as anchors for the plastic that surrounded the rest of the asteroid. Actually, I’d heard the details before. Lucy had been a project engineer, picking up a dose of radiation in the process.

My bags were on the floor beside my feet. I slid my hood up over my face and sealed it. There was a freighter to catch, departing in forty-one hours. In the meantime, I’d have a modest and preoccupied look around Ceres, and pay my last respects to Lucy. Halfway through the voyage here, her Telecom on Bulfinch 4137 had finally been answered—by a uniformed stranger.

“This is Win Bear. Is Mrs. Kropotkin in?”

His smartsuit was adjusted to a friendly paramilitary appearance f
a
vored by firemen and park rangers. “I’m, er, Warden Trayle, of Rothbard’s Regi
s
try Patrol. Mrs. Kropotkin was one of our clients—you any relation?”

“Uh...brother-in-law.” Well, it was almost true. “And what do you mean
‘was’
?” There was Lucy’s favorite chair, shipped all the way from Earth, a pair of kittens perched up on the back, batting at each other. Above what surely must have been a purely decorative mantelpiece, a bust of L
y
sander Spooner—Lucy’s favorite Confederate President—a pair of her own rea
d
ing glasses perched on his nose.

“Well, sir, I arrived this afternoon on routine patrol. She didn’t answer the ‘com, but her flivver was still here. I scouted around, then qu
e
ried my dispatcher. He said she’d been gunned down Ceres-side. I should secure the property and check the autofeeder for the cats until we figured out what more to do. I was just attending to that, when you—”

“Gunned down?” The idea was appalling. Lucy was nearly as sharp with a shooting iron as Captain Forsyth. “By who—whom?”

“Dunno—wanna talk with my chief? I’ll give you his combo.”

The cranky little man with a checkered smartsuit and illusory bow tie confirmed it: Lucy had been struck from behind in a Ceres Central pu
b
lic corridor, by a high-velocity projectile through the heart—the first murder in the city in over ten years. Funeral arrangements were such-and-such, apol
o
gies, condolences, and Warden Trayle was three hours behind schedule, the bum.

Now, Koko and I took our final elevator ride down to the crater floor, the
Bonaventura
teetering an incredible two miles over our heads. With seve
r
al hundred other passengers, we hopped a surface vehicle across the starlit, sunny port, winding in and out among at least another hundred slumbering behemoths, none nearly so magnificent as the giant liner.

The shuttle, a buslike affair, headed for the mountains, and the longest tunnel I’ve ever been through. By the time its massive multiple doors had opened before us and closed behind us a dozen times, the sky was a beaut
i
ful bright blue again, with fleecy clouds and green growing things all around, all around.

“Will you be staying in Ceres Central, Boss?” Koko watched the sc
e
nery flash by. It didn’t occur to me until later to wonder how a hoverbus had operated in the hard vacuum of Gunter’s Landing.