The Venus Belt (22 page)

I stoked up a seaweed cigar and leaned back in the wire frame to which I’d strapped myself. “What I
don’t
understand is why this little goodie didn’t self-destruct when the rest of the fireworks went off.” At least a dozen m
i
nor explosions had shaken the asteroid, shattering communications, cri
p
pling the small fleet of private flivvers belonging to the residents.

Lucy chuckled, a weird synthetic noise I still wasn’t used to. “It sure as shingles
tried
, Winnie. From th’ looks, I’d say it’s been out there
more
’n
a few months—it’s pretty peppered up with micros.” She turned the dust-pocked gadget to display a particular module. “Got a little bitty meta
l
lic rockette right here, wedged ‘tween th’ chasis an’ th’ receiver—kinda shorted out th’ bang button.”

“So,” I mused, “we have a sophisticated, intelligent enemy doing long-range planning—but who didn’t foresee a little item like the micr
o
meteorite density in this region. Somebody who isn’t from the Belt?”

“Good deducin’, sonny. We’re gonna
need
that devious mind of yers from here on out if we’re aimin’ at crackin’ this scheme.”

Reeouhoo whistled for another snack and nodded at me again.

***

Even such a puny effort of deduction jarred me badly: I was very well acquainted with at least one pair of Reeouhoo’s tiny handful who might be technically capable of faking a solar flare, two missing friends possibly i
n
volved with the apparent opposition, Aphrodite, Ltd.

What’s worse, it made me realize how out of practice I’d become. Clarissa’s disappearance, assorted other traumatic events, the weirdly chan
g
ing scenery, had combined to reduce my little gray cells to ineffectual sigh
t
seeing mush.

Reeouhoo wasn’t the only one who should be chagrined.

Even more, I was shaken by the way I’d been taken, by friend and foe alike, for a fucking
sleigh ride
. Since leaving Laporte, I’d been harried and railroaded, steamrollered and run-around, always
re-acting
,
never initia
t
ing anything. I’d been out of self-control and under the thumb of seen and u
n
seen movers, as surely as if I’d been brain-bored myself.

It was time to change my
modus operandi
,
seize events, and try to figure out exactly what the hell was going on. This asteroid seemed a perfect place for it, so I dug in my heels and stayed to sit and think and
plan
.

And get live seafood dropped in by a flying gorilla.

Okay. Item: a number of good people, particularly my wife, were AWOL. Possibly, I reminded myself, for a variety of different reasons. Po
s
sibly not.

Item: I myself had been the object of numerous, highly varied assaults upon my dignity, property, and continued longevity.

Item: some of this seemed connected to Aphrodite, Ltd., and its el
u
sive entrepreneur, who possibly had Hamiltonian motivations. Possibly not.

Item: none of this made very much sense; if there was some conspi
r
acy percolating, it was pretty disorganized. Take those attacks: som
e
body’d tried to eighty-six me with a tampered Webley (unless they’d been after Olongo), then sicced an undergunned and brain-bored pistolera on me in the bar. But smack between two murderous attempts, they’d rifled my room while I was sound asleep, without harming a single cilium on my defenseless pate—until I woke up and made a fuss.

It sure as hell complicated things, but the only rational conclusion was that there were actually
two
conspiracies, one group a bunch of rats who clabbered other people’s brains and dropped shipping crates on mine. The other bunch, for reasons of their own, hesitated to kill but not to bu
r
gle—the chickens.

The Chickens and the Rats, that was it.

Fair enough: could I sort out all the things they’d done, determine which was done by whom? It might tell me what each group wanted, give me a clue to who they were. If the Rats had Ed, I’d probably never find him—better hope it was the Chickens. Olongo’s pistol? The Rats, though his disappearance presented the same unanswerable questions as Ed’s. The crate was a Rat-type notion, too, but it seemed sort of off-the-cuff, which clashed with the long-range attitude the solar-flare hoax implied. Did that mean the hoax was a Chicken job?

Finally, Clarissa: same questions as Ed and Olongo, to tell the unco
m
fortable truth—reinforced by what they’d done to our home and Properta
r
ian h.q. So: Chickens searched people’s rooms and planted fancy electro
n
ics on Navigation Rocks. With any luck (though I honestly doubted it), they also kidnapped people—
and took very good care of them
.

Rats were arsonists, used the brain-bore, attempted murder—and, yes, left Hamiltonian medallions lying carelessly around. And that, I was afraid, was another point against Ed and Olongo.

And Clarissa.

For the hundred-thousandth time, I regretted bitterly making her stay behind. My reasons had certainly seemed good enough, and went far b
e
yond the daughter she was carrying for us now.

This wasn’t the first time we’d tried. And failed.

Despite a medical technology that, from my viewpoint, borders on ne
c
romancy (or perhaps
because
of it), the Confederacy tends to bow to nature and let these tragedies happen as they will. Clarissa had suffered through three miscarriages, and I’d suffered right along beside her with all the guilt and shame and anger that’s normal, despite what each of us knew profe
s
sionally about the psychology of the thing.

We never came even remotely close to splitting up, as sometimes ha
p
pens, but there was a strain, there was one
hell
of a strain.

And then the Healer in her seemed to take over, tearfully stubborn and cold-blooded in the oddest of circumstances. That was when she i
n
formed me flatly that she’d been keeping tissue samples from the begi
n
ning. When I finally caught on to what she was saying, I—well, I couldn’t bear to watch her do the sections, but stared with fascination at the micrographs as she savagely hunted down the common genetic m
i
sprint at the center of our grief.

Then she turned around and
built
us a daughter, chromosome by chr
o
mosome, searching for and banishing every weakness she could find, taking half from me and half from herself. She made
me
flip the coin—insisted it’s the father’s job to determine the sex of a child.

Sentimental to the last, that girl.

***

That afternoon I shared my inconclusions with Lucy. Koko was off ae
r
ial spearfishing; the Orcas were busy mending interplanetary fences. She shoved a cigarette-cassette into the appropriate slot. “Don’t know as I share yer reasonin’, Winnie. F’rinstance, one group coulda nabbed Cl
a
rissa, an’ another blew yer place up. Shows how bad things are when
that
seems like positive thinkin’.”

“Yes, two separate outfits might have burgled Olongo and made
him
disappear—which implies the Chickens and the Rats are in conflict. You know, they
could
have blown up Navigation Rock altogether, if they’d wan
t
ed. That practically
proves
that—”

“These Chickens of yers are only benevolent by
comparison,
boy. This hoax has cost us Belters zillions in lost opportunities alone.”

I stubbed out my cigar. “Agreed. But what’s next? I
can’t
go home, now, you’ve got me about convinced that the answer’s out here. Lucy, it’s time I
did
something. Problem is, I can’t figure out what!”

“Well, back when th’ taxpayers was involuntarily supportin’ you, what would you have done?”

“Oh hell...There’s Tormount—a dead end. Even Voltaire Malaise couldn’t—”

“Yeah, but Malaise sure knows more’n he can broadcast—always that way with newsies: lawsuits an’ so on.”

“Chalk it up as a possible lead. What else have we got?”

“A solid line right to th’ kidnappers. Ed found ‘em, didn’t he?”

“They found
him
. If I retraced his steps, how could we avoid getting grabbed ourselves? Shit: loose ends scattered all
over
the System. A tho
u
sand detectives couldn’t—”

“No, but how about a thousand
ex-Congress critters
?
Looks like Hamilt
o
nian trouble—betcha we could holler up a
passel
of help over that. Can’t do it from here, though. We’re too modulatin’ vulnerable, an’ I’d wanna use m’own I S & R jimcrackery, anyway.”

“Information Storage and Retrieval—you mean on your own aster
o
id?”

“Good ol’
Bulfinch
—’thall th’ gods an’ goddesses they were namin’ rocks after, figured I’d just finish off th’ list in one swell foop. It’s
real
well d
e
fended, Winnie—if I’d stayed home, I’da never got gunned down in th’ first place.”

“Now you’re talking. Let’s collect Koko. You start rounding up the ca
v
alry, and I’ll follow Ed’s leads—
very
carefully. I’ll even brace Malaise and find out what he’s not telling civilization. How’s that sound?”

“What I wanted t’do all along—only you were all fer hightailin’ it Earth-side.”

I gathered my belongings and flagged a squid for transportation to the Airlock Motel while Lucy sank sedately beneath the waves to inform our hosts. She also put out a call for Koko.

Seven hours later, my assistant
still
hadn’t shown up. The Orcas stopped looking when they found her wings folded and tucked beneath a submarine bush of some kind, and held down by a rock. A counter at the northern lock said someone had cycled it roughly two hours before Lucy and I deci
d
ed it was time to leave.

Ed’s Ad Astra was no longer in orbit around Navigation Rock. The o
n
ly person besides the two of us who knew how to start the engines without being blown to confetti was my loyal assistant. In its place was a standard distress transponder flashing idiotically, its radio voice silenced by a slash of the sidecutters.

Inside was a note, written on the kind of thermoplastic paper used i
n
side the aquatic asteroid.

Dear Boss and Lucy:

I wish I could say how Sorry this makes me, but there really isn’t any choice. Some Things take precedence over others. If I could only tell you more—but the Cause I’m working for is Important and we must have S
e
crecy for a while yet. Someday you all will be able to forgive me. At least I hope so.

Koko

Half an hour later the south pole airlock irised closed behind a spac
e
ship twice the average flivver’s tonnage, which practically disma
n
tled itself regurgitating Telecom equipment, makeup people, rewrite ar
t
ists, flunkies, and technicians of at least four different species.

And—last but not least—the august personage himself, Voltaire M
a
laise.

August or September, the Most-Trusted-Newsman-In-The-System would’ve stood out in a crowd like that one, if for no other reason than that he alone, of all the participants and spectators (Lucy and me among them), disdained to wear a smartsuit. He stepped down in his legendary brown beat-up serape and battered gray Stetson, beneficently surveying the wo
r
shipful throng with visible satisfaction.

Patton could have make an entrance like that. Or Alice Cooper.

Bestowing upon his admirers one final noble gaze, he took the nearest elevator into the asteroid, and the crowd evaporated in a sort of rev
e
rential hush. I signaled Lucy and we drifted to the lift ourselves, half-expecting to be following a trail of rose petals.

Five cigar butts and a fish sandwich later, I found myself staring down at my own business card, being returned to me in the service corr
i
dor where I’d been kept simmering for hours. One Roger Benton, a fellow with a pe
r
manently worried look, chief accomplice and weekend pinch-hitter to the Voice of the Stars, tendered his apologies. “Mr. Bear, I didn’t even get a chance to bring it up. He’s got a touch of bronch
i
tis—the humidity in this impossible place—and needs a rest before beamtime.”