The Venus Belt (35 page)

“No,” answered Deejay, “they’ve gone to the stars, just as they planned. Only—well, none of them will wind up where they intended. Each ship will have to jump blindly, again and again, until it finds a habitable planet to se
t
tle. They’re scattered randomly across dozens of pa
r
secs—and thousands of years—with no way to come home, ever again.”

“Good heavens!” shuddered Olongo.

“Good riddance!” snorted Lucy.

Doomsday, 224 A.L.

D. Nolan Fraser got elected President last week. In the Confederacy, it’s “None of the Above” for the second time this century. Information specia
l
ists at the Emperor Norton University have finally deciphered those myst
e
rious signals from the stars—with a little help from Deejay and her par
a
tronics crew. It didn’t come as much of a surprise to hear Voltaire Malaise, deBroached and unscrambled at last, whimpering across the light-years for
help!
Any kind of
help!
The Confederacy—or anyone else,
please
?

Unfortunately, it’s stale news. He’s centuries dead by now. Radio’s n
o
toriously slow at interstellar distances. There are scie
n
tist-entrepreneurs in the System groping toward a more reliable star drive, based on some entirely different principles, but old Voltaire’ll be centuries dead
again
by the time anybody gets to him and his makeshift, randomly established colony of would-be sultans.

At least he’d really had a chance to be the Voice of the Stars; you can still hear him on a quiet winter night. He hadn’t much chance at being an
y
thing else, especially an immortal god to helpless slaves and worshi
p
pers. Ed had seen to that; busiest little monkey-wrencher since FDR conned the Nipponese into ending a Depression the hard way.

Must’ve gotten pretty crowded out on Bester toward the end—that
ot
h
er
Bester in the section of the cosmos where I used to hang my hat. Where the Federalists had built their ill-starred fleet. So full of brain-bored harem-candidates they’d had to put the overflow—like Lucy and me—in Aphr
o
dite country, this side of the Broach.

In all that moving-day confusion, Ed had sprung himself, thanks to a trick he’d learned from me: a second, hidden gun. One night when they were feeding the First Class jailbirds, he blew away a pair of attendants and lit out for the nooks and crannies. They were suffering a manpower shor
t
age at the time—one of his keepers was a former French-Canadian Prime M
i
nister—and the electronic zombies weren’t doing any talking, so it was rel
a
tively easy for Ed to hit and run and hit again from hiding. Good thing he’d moved when he did: his final meal killed the four-legged rats who’d gotten to it. Swell bunch of guys, the Hamilt
o
nians.

Ed didn’t waste the time he’d bought himself. Scraps of goonish co
n
versation were enough to piece together what was just about to ha
p
pen. I’m proud I taught the boy to hit below the belt: one by one he searched out every cache of geriatric goodies waiting to be loaded; one by one he subst
i
tuted sugar, corn syrup, inert electronics—anything that looked right—for the real thing, which he smashed and flushed down the plumb-ing. At the time it must have seemed a small revenge, but it was something.

Ditto for another item of adroit sabotage: brain-bores operate on gu
c
cione cells, just like Confederate flashlights and flivvers. Ordinarily, they last a long, long time. But all good things come to an end (or at least require recharging), and when the original power units begin to fail, the Hamilton
i
ans will discover (
have
discovered—it’s a crazy universe) that what they’d thought were crates of new cells are actually my former par
t
ner’s last-minute rock collection.
Plus
emptyings from his smartsuit.

I like Ed, he reminds me of me.

Give ‘em two years at the outside. The tiny minority of male “gods” are going to wind up with an extremely large, angry female lynch mob on their hands. Ed couldn’t keep a quarter-million innocents from being shanghaied, not all by himself—but he’d given them the chance to seize control of their own lives again. And on an even basis with their kidna
p
pers. That’s better than nothing—and a hell of a lot better than what Malaise and his gang had planned.

Which makes me wonder what’s transpired in the centuries since Vo
l
taire discovered the mess he and his accomplices were in. What kinds of civilizations are growing up among the two hundred thirty random stars where the lost fleet has come to its scattered rest? Deejay tells me some of them may have flickered back in time as much as five or six thousand years. Others, having accidentally blinked into the future, won’t be arriving yet for an equal length of time.

Weird.

If they’d all been Confederates, there wouldn’t be much doubt about the kind of prosperous, aggressively progressive anarchistic societies they’ll have created by now. But the women are mostly from the United States and other countries in my homeworld, as are the bulk of bureaucrats and dict
a
tors who dreamed of owning worlds.

The few individuals from this side of reality—the Hamiltonians—are philosophical throwbacks.

Five thousand years. That’s a lot of time for the successive rise and fall of one perverted, totalitarian culture after another. Most of them will lose their grip—gradually, or all at once—on the very technology that took them to the stars. Maybe more than one world is a radioactive ruin already, while others struggle through a new Stone Age.

We’ll go out someday and take a look.

But we need a better way of getting there, and in the meantime, we have other fish to fry. Deejay’s been filling our heads with lots of other weird and wonderful notions since Olongo finally invited us out to see for ourselves what Aphrodite, Ltd. was really all about. This necessitated another spac
e
ship ride, aboard the less-luxurious (but roomier, owing to the hig
h
ly select passenger list)
Indomitable Spirit
.

“Now you’re sure you have everything, dearest?” Last time we’d v
i
sited her folks in Antarctica, she’d forgotten diapers. It had been a long, long plane ride, subjectively, until we found a drugstore in Marie Byrd Land.

“You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?” She smiled sic
k
ly sweet, shut the suitcase, and turned to watch Lucille, who was doing her damnedest to eat the bedspread, little chenille balls and all.

“Forget it, honey. Vacations always seem like
work
to me, especially with our little friend here.” I took my lovely wife in my arms and squeezed her, suddenly regretting that we were leaving so soon. “This is certainly going to be a hell of a trip for her—something to tell her grandchildren.” I released Clarissa, lit a cigar, then turned up the bedroom ventilators to protect L
u
cille’s tiny, brand-new lungs—hardly out of warranty yet, seemed like a shame to spoil them.

Lucille kicked her naked little legs and giggled, drooling idiotically. The doorbell asked if we were expecting visitors, so I went downstairs to answer it. There was Ed, a rented Studebaker piled with baggage thrumming in the driveway behind him. And waiting in it—

“
Lucy!
Does this mean we don’t have to visit you in the hospital any more? I was getting pretty tired of the smell of disinfectant.”

“
Now
he tells me!” A slender, not quite pretty, dark-haired girl di
s
mounted from the driver’s seat, smoothed her skirt down over boot-tops, and ran up the rubber-covered drive. She grabbed me crushingly around the neck and kissed me on both cheeks. “So much fer th’ formalities, Winnie—don’t stand there with yer choppers hangin’ out, I wanna see m’namesake!” She bolted through the door and upstairs to the bedroom.

I ran my tongue self-consciously over the cloned incisors Clarissa had implanted several months ago, imagining with a shudder what life would be like for “aged cripples” like Lucy and me or a billion others in the kind of pa
r
adise Malaise had wanted. Like the man said, nasty, brutish, and short.

Ed grinned, combed a hand through his hair and massaged the side of his nose, a gesture I recognized eerily as my own. “You realize how pleased she was you named your only-begotten after her?”

“How could it be otherwise? Lucy is Honorary Grandma, after all.”

“Which makes me Lucille’s accidental uncle and honorary grandfather at the same time. Sounds like incest. Well, Lucy may not look it any more, but at least she’s got enough seniority for the job. I’m only sixty—I sure don’t
feel
like a grandpa.”

“Let’s see...she’s now about twice your age. By the time you’re 160, she’ll only be 250—you’re gaining on her, slow but steady.”

He laughed. “First thing she does with her brand-new body is take me surfing in the Davis Strait Mitigation Zone—she broke seventeen bones. Good thing she isn’t any younger, I can’t keep up with her now!” We fo
l
lowed at a more sedate velocity to the second floor, where Clarissa had a
p
parently finished packing.

“Well, sweetheart, about ready for another interplanetary voyage?”

“As long as we go together this time.” She looked down at our daughter and frowned. “
And
as soon as you’ve changed her—again. It
was
you who insisted that we pack
all
the diapers, wasn’t it?”

***

Let me warn you here and now that freefall sex is highly overrated. And extremely messy. If you time things wrong, you can even wind up on opp
o
site sides of the room, just at the supreme moment.

Luckily, we spent most of the next thirty days at constant boost, where things like wives—and dirty diapers—stay more or less where you put them. Our voyage ended at a set of plastic handstraps hanging in the polarized windows of an orbiting junkyard where
Indomitable Spirit
had dropped us off—before fleeing prudently Outward once again.

I couldn’t decide whether it was harder getting used to Lucy as a healthy young woman again, or seeing my baby daughter wearing her very first smartsuit. At least it solved the changing problem, as I said, no small co
n
sideration in zero gravity. Until she was old enough to handle them intell
i
gen
t
ly for herself, her suit controls would be located in the middle of her back. In the meantime, I was trying to figure whether there was a market for computerized rubber didies back on Earth.

And wondering if anybody’s thought of making smartsuits for cats.

It was almost as difficult accommodating to the scenery outside those windows. If anyone had ever told a certain overworked and tired Denver cop, a decade and a half ago, that someday he was going to see a sight like this, I’d have laughed myself straight into a coronary.

Now, here it was, a fuzzy ball of cotton, far too brilliant to bear loo
k
ing at without dampering the windows. Through the deeply darkened plastic, the world below us seemed to occupy a starless void. The sun was on the other side of the station, and there’d never been a moon here. Until recen
t
ly. I heard a door whoosh open behind me and swiveled on my handstrap just in time to catch Ooloorie entering the observation deck, followed clos
e
ly by her partner.

“Well, my finely furred landlings,” said the porpoise, bobbing four feet off the grating, fluttering a suit-covered tail now and again to mai
n
tain that position, “how do you like my planet out there?” Her ventral impellers whispered briefly; she drifted to the windows, reaching out a suit-mounted manipulator to stop herself on a handstrap.

Deejay grinned. “Twenty-nine months in orbit, now she thinks she
owns
it!”

“Indeed, insubordinate calf, a full
51/4
percent, blue-chip, iron-bound, and potentially quite lucrative. The same as your share, my dear.”

The human physicist grinned again, at me this time. “I understand Olongo passed a little profit your way, too.”

“A tenth percent for each of us, provided this ridiculous scheme comes off on schedule.” I still didn’t know what we were being rewarded for. My own blunderings hadn’t accomplished that much. Evil has a habit, genera
l
ly, of destroying itself—though it never hurts to help it along a little. “Pe
r
sonally, I’m not sure this neighborhood’s healthy, are you?” Even half a million miles away, the planet looked too big and deadly. Like a time bomb.