The Venus Belt (4 page)

Beep!
Only the old chimp failed to go for his gun: I reholstered mine and watched my blushing bride do likewise, sticking out her tongue at me as I reached into a belt pouch for my pocket-pager, the only one in L
a
porte, possibly unique in all the Confederacy.

“And that’s another thing,” she told him. “How any civilized being to
l
erates a nosy, interrupting nuisance like that. . .”

“Then don’t interrupt so often, dear.” I wasn’t quite adroit enough to spare my shin a wifely kick. Forsyth simply shrugged his furry shoulders. He knew me, almost as well as Clarissa pretends not to sometimes, and unde
r
stands how an old cop’s habits die hard. I limped dramatically to the Tel
e
com and undedicated it. There, relayed from our machine at home, was a
n
other pretty face. Just my lucky day, I guess.

“Winnie? Clarissa, girl? This here’s Lucy!” Only this face hadn’t been so pretty when I’d first seen it, splotched and withered, wrinkled with old age and radiation sickness, topped with a mop of snow-white hair and an outr
a
geous paisley sunbonnet.

Lucille Gallegos Kropotkin had lived next door to the house Clarissa and I now occupied, neighbor and friend to a good friend of mine, E
d
ward William Bear—my
own
counterpart in this world. Lucy had gotten well, r
e
gained her youth, hitched up with Ed, and moved out to the ast
e
roids. I looked closely now at her warm dark eyes, olive skin, and glossy black hair. Pretty sexy for 148.

“Listen, you two,” she advised, “this here’s a recordin’—can’t wait around fer signals t’get there an’ back. I was gonna call anyway, see how th’ baby’s comin’ along an’ all, but...well, it ain’t gonna be as pleasant as all that, now.”

She glanced down at some object in her hand and shook her head.

“I got trouble. Somethin’ fishy goin’ on out here, an’ Ed—th’ du
m
my—started pokin’ round, rusty at detectivin’ as he was...”

She stopped, squinted hard against a flow of tears that was visibly only seconds away. “Anyhow, he—Win, I hate like th’ dickens t’put you out, a daughter on th’ way, an all, but—Ed’s been missin’ fer
days,
an’ I found
this
in his desk an hour ago. You’ll know what it means.”

She held a medallion to the pickup, round, about an inch and a half in diameter, bronze. I didn’t have to inspect it to know there was a date on one side, 1789. On the reverse loomed the eerie trademark of the System’s foremost enemies of liberty: the Hamiltonian Eye-in-the-Pyramid.

“Win, get out here pronto! He may already be d-dead by now!”

Wednesday, February 24, 223 A.L.

“I am
not!”
Clarissa stamped a foot she hadn’t seen in weeks. In the thick carpeting of our gymnasium-size living room, the effect was lost.

“You are too!” I sat, chomping on my cigar, and glowered at her.

“
I am not!
”

“You are
too!
”

Clickety-click-click.
“Can I be excused from this colloquium?” My chief assistant and apprentice gumshoe, Koko Featherstone-Haugh, leaned back on a sofa, knitting a sweater for the baby. Koko’s a youngish female gorilla, favorite niece of the President of the North American Confederacy.

And they pronounce it “Fanshaw.”

“Sure,” I growled back, “go on out in the kitchen and peel yourself a plantain. You’re on her side, anyway.”

Koko hitched her holster into a more comfortable position and took a sip of King Kong Kola, a brand suddenly popular since the recent import
a
tion of a certain movie.
Click-click-clickety.
“I am not.”

“You are too! Say, this sounds familiar. Did I not hear you, with my very own ears, state that ‘mere pregnancy’ is no reason Clarissa shouldn’t go to the asteroids with me?” I looked closer at her knitting, wondering if I should mention that the arms were getting a bit long.

Click-clickety-click.
“Is that a question from my employer, or merely the husband of my dearest friend?”
Clickety-click-click.

“Waffling already! Look, even without Hamiltonians mixed up in this, space travel’s no kind of risk for—”

Clarissa sat down beside me. “Win, I’m a Healer. I’m also a fully grown sapient being...”

I’d seen this independent mood before. Unfortunately it was a major reason I loved the woman. “Yes?”

“I
know what I’m doing!
Maybe they fly around on giant firecrackers where
you
come from—”

“Unfair! Just because my country’s economically depressed—”

“And technologically backward.”
Click-click-clickety.

“Butt out, banana-breath!
And
technologically backward, that’s no re
a
son to...Listen: how many gees you figure to pull, just getting up to the li
n
er?”

“Hmm. Well, the liner itself starts out at one gee, gradually dropping to a tenth of that by the time it reaches Ceres. That can’t be too bad, can it?”

“
You
can it. Answer my question: how many gees aboard the
shuttle
?”

“Uh, six—but there are ways, Win, heart patients do it all the—”

“Swell. You’ll qualify sometime the middle of the twenty-fifth century.
I’m
leaving at the end of the week. You think I
like
going off a hundred mi
l
lion miles, maybe missing the baby—certainly missing you?” I leaned over to kiss her and hesitated. “Hey, Miss Simian Collegiate, I thought you wan
t
ed to be excused.”

“Don’t mind me, this’ll be terrific for the anthro paper I’m doing: ‘Love among the Humans—Ennui or Boredom?’”
Click-click-clickety-clack!
“Dirty bad —I’ve dropped another...I wonder who
that
can be?”

I got up and crossed to the windows. It was difficult to see in the eve
n
ing twilight; Confederate tastes run to generous acreage, lots of trees, hed
g
es, miscellaneous bushery. The folks at Cheyenne Ridge had gru
d
gingly let a little white stuff through, not enough to dampen the electrically warmed streets, but plenty for postcard scenery, maybe a snowman or two in the morning. I gave
the window knob a twirl, doubling the a
m
plification. Sure enough, through the gate and up the gracefully curving rubber-surfaced drive, a hovercraft skated to a landing and two familiar furry shapes climbed out.

I turned to my companions. “How about something in the fireplace? And kill the fatted whiskey bottle. It’s Captain Forsyth—and the mo
n
key’s uncle.”

***

Olongo Featherstone-Haugh, a mountain among gorillas, handed me forty yards of dampened overcloak, unwinding a mile or two of muffler from around his massive neck. “Can’t be too careful, old boy”—he wiped an errant snowdrop from his pistol grip—”
awfully
prone to respiratory co
m
pl
i
cations, don’t you know.”

True enough. Even given current medical technology, no gorilla took unnecessary chances that way. I added Forsyth’s ancient yellow slicker to a heap of steaming garments on the stair rail. Upstairs, Koko had a roa
r
ing fire started. Clarissa handed the President about a gallon and a half of Scotch.

“Ahh! A wintry evening among friends. Thanks indeed, dear lady.”

“Catch your prowler yet?” I asked. Some fool had broken into his o
f
fice last weekend. Putting in some overtime, Olongo had come back from the john and interrupted them in mid-burgle.

He settled in my biggest chair, arms stretched comfortably across his ample frontage, firelight flickering in his eyes. “Afraid not, old man. St
u
pid sod that I am, I left my life-preserver in the office when I stepped out. Spot of luck they didn’t shoot me with it—had it halfway out of the holster when I threw that wastebasket. Next time I’ll be ready for them. Now tell me about this emergency of Lucy’s before I perish from curios
i
ty.”

“Not much to tell.” I pushed my somewhat less-magnificent facade aside to reach into my sporran for a Bic—another popular i
m
port—rekindling my cigar. Clarissa wrinkled her nose and punched the ve
n
tilation up on the Telecom pad lying in her lap. I passed a tiny dat
a
chip across to Olongo. “Been trying all day to get more than this from her, but—”

“I understand.” The gorilla nodded. “Something about solar interfe
r
ence.”

“Mighty
odd
solar interference,” Forsyth muttered as he took another swallow of Kola—he preferred soft drinks, too, a legacy of many years’ a
b
stinence on duty. “Wrong time of year, wrong part of the solar cycle. Lucy’s right—something funny going on.”

“My dear Captain, these things happen.” The President lifted a weighty paw and set it down again. There was a distinctly reddish quality to his pelt; I never had the nerve to ask about orangutans in the woodpile. “The cycle’s only an approximation, after all.” He handed back the chip. “Why not o
b
serve for ourselves what Lucy had to say?”

I slid the chip into another ‘com pad—we keep several around—the fireplace winked out of existence, and the wall lit up with Lucy’s face.

“
Winnie! Clarissa, girl! This here’s Lucy!
...”

This time I ignored her words, concentrating on the surroundings. A commercial booth. Not her homestead, then, on—what was it?—Bulfinch 4137, a tiny planetoid she and Ed owned outright. Behind her people bu
s
tled through a crowded corridor. Ceres, I guessed, first stop on my spaceli
n
er’s itinerary. But why Ceres and not her home?

The message ended. I turned the fireplace display back on, felt its radi
a
tion warm my face again and shimmer softly on the polished wood and metal of the weapons in the case across the room.

“Intriguing,” Olongo mused, “if not very informative. Notice how she kept looking back over her shoulder? What do you plan doing about it, Win?”

I watched the fireplace a moment. “Well, I’m booked aboard the
Indom
i
table Spirit
,
leaving day after tomorrow. When you guys showed up, we’d finally decided that Clarissa wasn’t—”

“Just a minute, Win Bear!” She looked up from the ‘com pad where she’d been telemetering her critical patients off and on all evening. “We never decided any such—”

“Clarissa”—I took her hand and patted it gently—“if it were just the baby, I might not...I mean, I love our daughter as if she were already born, but you can always make another kid.”

“That’s easy for
you
to say!” This from my shaggy apprentice, sprawled across the floor beside the fire. She ran a pickup down each nearly finished sweater arm, stared at the slip of paper in her hand and at the conflicting data on the tiny screen, a look of simian puzzlement on her face.

“Shut up, Koko.”

“Can he talk to me that way, Uncle President?”

“Not when I’m around—
to do it for him
.
Shut up, dear, there’s a good ape.”

Clarissa squeezed my hand. “I know what you’re trying to say, Win, but—”

“No buts! I
can’t
get another Clarissa, in this universe or any other. I didn’t mean to make this a public debate, but what would you be saying if it were
me
who was pregnant?”

She opened her mouth, glanced down at my generously developed mi
d
dle, and giggled. Maybe a dissertation on married telepathy might do K
o
ko’s anthropology grades some good, but hell, let her find out for he
r
self.

“I hate it when you’re right,” Clarissa sighed. “To tell the truth, I was
wondering
how I’d stand up to six gees. So what are we going to do?” There was that sad look on her face. Any more of this, I’d probably let her come along.

“Be miserable for a while.” In all our married years, we’d spent maybe five, six nights apart. “I’ll try making it as short a while as possible. Wish I could get hold of Lucy—thought we’d killed off all those Hamiltonian ba
s
tards years ago.”