The Venus Belt (21 page)

“Howdy,” Lucy opened. “Got a place a body can set a spell?”

The largest of the creatures swam toward me, its suit a delicate co
m
plex of geometric patterns. “Greetings, Lucy Kropotkin. It is I, Reeo
u
hoo, come to welcome you to Navigation Rock.” Apparently Lucy had neglected to switch over to acoustic communications. I got her off the radio and we straightened identities around. Reeouhoo, an old acquai
n
tance of Lucy’s (and who wasn’t, from the asteroids to Burbank?), was dismayed to learn about her injuries. Koko was duly introduced, and so was I—learning in the process that there had been a perfectly good ai
r
lock for land-dwellers down at the asteroid’s south pole.

“Well, no harm done,” chattered Lucy. “An’ anyway, we got the wate
r
lock workin’ again. Saw yer broadcastin’ tower, too—what’s left of it.” She’d settled to the bottom where a miniature submarine sand dune began collec
t
ing on her lee side. Koko was paddling around like a giant frog, while I, never the most enthusiastic of swimmers, peered up at the surface, a br
o
ken, fluttering mirror only a few yards above our heads. This would be one of the shallow ends of the pool—Lucy had mentioned depths as great as a tho
u
sand feet at the equator. “Gonna tell us how it happened?”

The giant porpoise hesitated. “We have yet to sound it out, my friend, and it is a murky situation indeed. I believe it would be best if you acco
m
panied us to a place of rest for land-dwellers. There we can relate to you as much as we know.”

Suddenly he whirled and burst into a welter of eardrum-splitting clicks and screeches. Dimly in the distance, an alien swarm appeared, unpo
r
poiselike, and coming toward us fast.

Some inner reflex made me backwater in mounting horror as the nightmare shadows overtook us. They swirled around us in a rapidly na
r
rowing circle and closed in. Dozens of glistening hungry tentacles enve
l
oped Lucy first, then Koko. I whirled in shock to discover a pair of the squishy, horrifying things behind me, fended off a sucker-studded arm, and fumbled desperately for my knife.

T
uesday, March 16, 223 A.L.

Koko flapped her wings and giggled.

Thirty feet below her, stretched half-asleep on the sun-baked roof of the
Oahu Wahoo,
I ducked, too late to avoid the slithery missile she’d r
e
leased from her toes. The sunfish hit me with a slimy
smack
! and lay there across my stomach making stupid mouthings. I shuddered and tossed it over the side, planning revenge.

The furry bombardier above me gained altitude, banked on a plastic wing, sculled fiercely for balance, then swooped to a hasty, amateurish lan
d
ing on the houseboat. As she stumbled past, I contributed a strategic foot to her confusion. She followed the sunfish over the rail with a di
s
mayed shriek and an enormous slow-motion splash. In Navigation Rock’s minimal pseudogravity, there were still droplets in the air when she regained the su
r
face, airfoils drooped in a disheveled tent around her.

“There is,” I informed her placidly, “justice in the universe
after
all.”

Koko spat out a salty mouthful and raised her wrist talker above the waves. “You got my pretty new wings all wet! Wait’ll I tell Lucy!”

Said personage rose with a blast from the lower deck and settled b
e
side me. “Tell me what? Say,
muchacha
,
yer supposed t’be
flyin
’
with them things, not swimmin’!”

The moment somehow shrank a little then, as it occurred to me how much Clarissa would have enjoyed it. I reached into my sporran on the deck, extracting a cigar: the killer whales, always looking to make an extra tenth-piece, had gene-spliced up a nicotine-producing strain of kelp. B
e
ing a generous sort, I was helping them test it. “Our aqueous aeronaut needs to practice touch-and-goes—though I suppose carrier-landings have their own peculiarities. What have you and your fishy friends been up to all morning, Lucy?”

It was going on three days since our arrival. The welcome we’d r
e
ceived had been expansive—if a little startling—beginning with a hair-raising jet-assist to landling territory from a squadron of Reeouhoo’s pet
Loligo pa
e
lii-plus
.
Maybe “pet” isn’t the best word—try “artifacts,” or “tools”—most sea-folk I knew well were chess pros, theoretical physicists, even opera sin
g
ers, content with purely abstract strivings, and mildly derisive of the mat
e
rialistic culture their fellow sapients have erected on the land.
This
delph
i
noid gang was different, following a pronounced mechanical bent that made them oddballs among
Cetacea.

Reeouhoo’s people were determinedly making up for the dirty evol
u
tionary trick that had equipped them with a weighty and complex brain while depriving them of any manipulatory faculty by which they might a
c
complish something tangible. Thus they’d made peculiar and brilliant use of giant squid—and of that same brain-bore technology I’d classified as irr
e
deemably disgusting only days ago.

Giant
squid? Well, maybe there are monsters in the depths of Earth’s great oceans who can lay better claim to the title; there’s plenty of ev
i
dence for horrors hundreds of squishy feet long. Navigation Rock’s were giant enough for me: four to six feet in length; just about right to make a swell pair of
hands
for killer whales. “Intelligent” peripherals. The nano
e
lectronics were anchored to the mantle of each cephalopod, tuned to the ultrasonic wishes of its Orca master:
tote
that barge;
push
that button and
scratch...
that’s right, a little lower and to the left...
Ahh
! At cetacean freque
n
cies, an amazing volume of information can be conveyed in a short burst. What I’d first ta
k
en for Reeouhoo’s panicky shrilling had merely been ultr
a
sonic marching orders for molluscs—I’d never have heard it at all if it weren’t for my smar
t
suit.

We’d been whisked away by the armpits to the normal receiving area for folks with legs, a sort of south-polar high-rise, with a flivver-dock and ai
r
lock in its basement, jutting several hundred feet above the shallows that surrounded it. Naturally, this land-dweller’s motel is in freefall, being at the center of rotation, and the trouble with the sea—or rather, the h
o
rizon—is that there isn’t any. It keeps on going up and up and up until it’s hidden in the clouds. On a clear day, you can see the north pole.

Having enjoyed my fill of weightlessness for the nonce—possibly for several nonces—I soon transferred to one of a string of houseboats tet
h
ered permanently at the equator.
Oahu Wahoo
was bright red with a phony sternwheel, a couple of potted palms on deck, and a little kitchen where I scrambled dinner for Koko and myself. (In return for which she daily hun
t
ed down the only fresh comestibles in twenty thousand miles.
I
had to do the gutting and scaling—she’s even more squeamish than her boss. Yechh.) I got regular sunburns up on the roof.

Okay, technically they were
radiation
burns. The fusion torch, stuck high atop an impossibly tall and slender mast on the penthouse of the south pole hotel, had a slowly rotating cowl, so the lights went out every “night” and came back on every “morning.” During the dark periods, its reflection on the ocean surface high overhead provided a handy surrogate moon.

Nice engineering.

Once or twice a day, owing to hurried business requiring a shor
t
cut—or maybe simply out of sheer high spirits—a killer whale would erupt expl
o
sively from the depths, surge high into the mist, and then, instead of splas
h
ing down again, keep sailing skyward with the spray until it plunged spe
c
tacularly into the waves on the opposite side of the world, gouging out a fo
a
my bullseye. A mini-tidal wave raced and rang around the hollow sea until it lapped against my boat and rocked it gently half an hour later.

The gap seemed impossibly wide, the trip often taking its passenger pe
r
ilously close to the “sun,” but the asteroid’s gravity was low and an
Orca
’s aim unerringly accurate. They don’t call it
Navigation
Rock for nothing.

Actual business was carried on far below in a series of peculiar offices. Yesterday, I’d hailed a passing
Loligo
and gone to take a peek, my a
p
prentice tagging along. We descended until the gauges on my arm began complai
n
ing, and hovered a few dozen feet from the bottom, looking down at a sort of prestressed concrete floorplan: low walls delineating different areas of the operation; roofless cubicles filled with giant Orca-designed instrument co
n
soles and desks. Everywhere squid were dus
t
ing away the steady rain of silt, skittering across pilot-lighted panels pushing buttons and twiddling knobs, typing, filing, hurrying plasticized memos back and forth, dodging stands of kelp, and batting at pesky fish who trespassed freely through the busy co
m
plex, often—mostly lu
n
chtimes—to their startled demise.

Every half-hour or so, one of the cetacean technicians or supervisors would rise abruptly, rocket to the surface for a breath of air or a snack taken on-the-fin, then dive back to its post, measuring, calculating, sending, and receiving vital data from all over the System. Somewhere, I knew, a marine accountant in a cluttered cubicle would be toting up the cost and mailing out the bills—computerwise, there’s no such thing as a free crunch.

Lucy had helped erect a temporary north polar antenna. Reeouhoo and his colleagues were in the dark concerning the original’s destruction, an act of sabotage that hadn’t been limited only to broadcasting equi
p
ment. This we’d learned that first day as we lounged on a lower, open level of the southern residential tower, enjoying drinks beside a glass-topped table and chatting with the finny folk who relaxed upon a watery shelf at our feet, washed by coriolis currents.

“Well, I’ll be a wall-eyed wallaby! Them stinkers took us all in, fer fair!” Lucy had just returned from outside, accompanied by thruster-powered technicians. She’d discovered a second surprise package, about the size of a shoebox, at the
south
pole. She held it before us now, dangling by a number of carefully loosened wires.

“So it would appear,” answered Reeouhoo. He sent a casual, many-tentacled “hand” racing over the waves behind him, seized an unwary su
r
face-basking perch, retrieved it, and munched reflectively. “Of course we can repair the material damage, but I fear heartily for our re
p
utation. Who would
do
such a thing?”

“Hamiltonians!
”
I answered, “or maybe Aphrodite, Ltd.”

“Could amount to th’ same thing,” Lucy advised.

“I still don’t get it.” Koko was having trouble adjusting the straps of her wings, another experiment the enterprising Orcas hoped would st
i
mulate a modest tourist trade.

I raised a finger. “Let me try—just to see if I’ve got it right, myself. It would seem, loyal assistant, that someone wanted all transportation in and out of the Belt suspended for a while—”

“
Belt? Suspended?
Boss, this conversation is going to
waist
!”

“For what reason, we do not know. Sometime in the past few months, they planted that device near a sensor array. At the right time, it began ma
k
ing noises like a solar flare. Nobody noticed until a later package d
e
stroyed the transmission antenna.” Subsequent cross-checks with the Rock’s seve
n
teen or eighteen major competitors—those who were back on the air—had revealed a System-wide pattern of treacherous s
a
botage.

The Orca gave a sort of wallowing nod. “I am chagrined. There are only a handful of artisans capable of deceiving the instruments we e
m
ploy. I can think of no one among them unethical enough...The damages to System commerce alone...”