Short fiction complete, p.159
Short Fiction Complete, page 159
And yet—his outrage seemed genuine enough. And yet—the instant he saw me, he said I was beautiful, even though clearly I was not.
“Don’t you worry,” Sam said, his round little face grim and determined. “I’m on your side, and we’ll figure out some way to stick this letter up those lawyer’s large intestines.”
“But the Moralist Sect is very powerful.”
“So what? You’ve got me, kiddo. All those poor praying sonsofbitches have on their side is God.”
I was still angry and confused as Sam and I climbed back into our space suits and he returned me to my pod on my—no, the asteroid. I felt a burning fury blazing within me, bitter rage at the idea of stealing my asteroid away from me. They were going to break it up and use it as raw material for their habitat!
Normally I would have been screaming and throwing things, but I sat quietly on the two-person scooter as we left the air lock of Sam’s ship. He was babbling away with a mixture of bravado, jokes, obscene descriptions of lawyers in general and Moralists in particular. He made me laugh. Despite my fears and fury, Sam made me laugh and realize that there was nothing I could do about the Moralists and their lawyers at the moment, so why should I tie myself into knots over them? Besides, I had a more immediate problem to deal with.
Sam. Was he going to attempt to seduce me once we were back at my quarters? And if he did, what would my reaction be? I was shocked at my uncertainty. Three years is a long time, but even to think of allowing this man. . . .
“You got a lawyer?” His voice came through the earphones of my helmet.
“No. I suppose the university will represent me. Legally, I’m their employee.”
“Maybe, but you . . . His voice choked off. I heard him take in his breath, like a man who has just seen something that overpowered him.
“Is that it?” Sam asked in an awed voice.
The Sun was shining obliquely on The Rememberer, so that the figures I had carved were shown in high relief.
“It’s not finished,” I said. “It’s hardly even begun.”
Sam swerved the little scooter so that we moved slowly along the length of the carvings. I saw all the problems, the places that had to be fixed, improved. The feathered serpent needed more work. The Mama Kilya, the Moon Mother, was especially rough. But I had to place her there because the vein of silver in the asteroid came up to the surface only at that point, and I needed to use the silver as the tears of the Moon.
Even while I picked out the weak places in my figures, I could hear Sam’s breathing over the suit radio. I feared he would hyperventilate. For nearly half an hour, we cruised slowly back and forth across the face of the asteroid, then spiraled around to the other side.
The one enormous advantage of space sculpture, of course, is the absence of gravity. There is no need for a base, a stand, a vertical line. Sculpture can be truly three-dimensional in space, as it was meant to be. I had intended to carve the entire surface of the asteroid.
“It’s fantastic,” Sam said at last, his voice strangely muted. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I’ll be hung by the cojones before I’ll let those double-talking bastards steal this away from you!”
At that moment I began to love Sam Gunn.
TRUE TO his word, Sam got his own lawyers to represent me. A few days after Adam Smith disappeared from my view, on its way to the Moralists’ construction site, I was contacted by the firm of Whalen and Krill, of Port Canaveral, Florida, U.S.A., Earth.
The woman who appeared on my comm screen was a junior partner in the firm. I was not important enough for either of the two senior men. Still, that was better than my university had done: their legal counsel had told me bleakly that I had no recourse at all, and I should abandon my asteroid forthwith.
“We’ve got the IAC arbitration board to agree to take up the dispute,” said Ms. Mindy Rourke, Esq. She seemed very young to me to be a lawyer. I was especially fascinated by her long hair falling luxuriantly past her shoulders. She could wear it like that only on Earth. In a low-gee environment, it would have spread out like a chestnut-colored explosion.
“I’ll have my day in court, then.”
“You won’t have to be physically present,” Ms. Rourke said. Then she added, with a doubtful little frown, “But I’m afraid the board usually bases its decisions on the maximum good for the maximum number of people. The Moralists will house ten thousand people in their habitat. All you’ve got is you.”
What she meant was that Art counted for nothing as compared to the utilitarian purpose of grinding up my asteroid, smelting it, and using its metal as structural materials for an artificial world to house ten thousand religious zealots who want to leave Earth forever.
Sam stayed in touch with me electronically, and hardly a day passed that he did not call and spend an hour or more chatting with me. Our talk was never romantic, but each call made me love him more. He spoke endlessly about his childhood in Nebraska, or was it Baltimore? Sometimes his childhood tales were based in the rainy hillsides of the Pacific Northwest. Either he had moved around ceaselessly as a child, or he was amalgamating talks from many other people and adopting them as his own. I never tried to find out. If Sam thought of the stories as his own childhood, what did it matter?
Gradually, as the weeks slipped into months, I found myself speaking about my own younger years. The half-deserted mountain village where I had been born. The struggle to get my father to allow me to go to the university instead of marrying, “as a decent girl should.” The professor who broke my heart. The pain that sent me fleeing to this asteroid and the life of a hermit.
Sam cheered me up. He made me smile, even laugh. He provided me with a blow-by-blow description of his own activities as an entrepreneur. Not content with owning and operating the Earth View Hotel and running a freight-hauling business that ranged from low Earth orbit to the Moon and out as far as the new habitats being built in Sun-circling orbits, Sam was also getting involved in building tourists facilities at Moonbase as well.
“And then there’s this advertising scheme that these two guys have come up with. It’s kinda crazy, but it might work.”
The “scheme” was to paint enormous advertisement pictures in the ionosphere, some fifty miles or so above the Earth’s surface, using electron guns to make the gases up at that altitude glow like the aurora borealis. The men that Sam was speaking with claimed that they could make actual pictures that could be seen across whole continents.
“When the conditions are right,” Sam added. “Like, it’s gotta be either at dusk or at dawn, when the sky looks dark from the ground but there’s still sunlight up at the right altitude.”
“Not many people are up at dawn,” I said.
It took almost a full minute between my statement and his answer, I was so distant from his base in Earth orbit.
“Yeah,” he responded at last. “So it’s gotta be around dusk.” Sam grinned lopsidedly. “Can you imagine the reaction from the environmentalists if we start painting advertisements across the sky?”
“They’ll fade away within a few minutes, won’t they?”
“The seconds stretched, and then he answered, “Yeah, sure. But can you picture the look on their faces? They’ll hate it! Might be worth doing just to give ’em ulcers!”
All during those long weeks and months, I could hardly work up the energy to continue my carving. What good would it be? The whole asteroid was going to be taken away from me, ground into powder, destroyed forever. I knew what the International Astronautical Council’s arbitrators would say: Moralists, ten thousand; Art, one.
For days on end, I would stand at my console, idly fingering the keyboard, sketching in the next set of figures that the lasers would etch into the stone. In the display screen, the figures would look weak, misshapen, distorted. Sometimes they glared at me accusingly, as if I were the one killing them.
Time and again I ended up sketching Sam’s funny, freckled, dear face.
I found reasons to pull on my space suit and go outside. Check the lasers. Adjust the power settings. Recalibrate the feedback sensors. Anything but actual work. I ran my gloved fingers across the faces of the hauqui, the guardian spirits I had carved into this metallic stone. It was a bitter joke. The hauqui needed someone to guard them from evil.
Instead of working, I cried. All my anger and hate was leaching away in the acid of frustration and waiting, waiting, endless months of waiting for the inevitable doom.
And then Sam showed up again, just as unexpectedly as the first time.
My asteroid, with me attached to it, had moved far along on its yearly orbit. I could see Earth only through the low-power telescope that I had brought with me, back in those first days when I had fooled myself into believing I would spend my free time in space studying the stars. Even in the telescope, the world of my birth was nothing more than a blurry, fat crescent, shining royal blue.
My first inkling that Sam was approaching was a message I found typed on my comm screen. I had been outside, uselessly fingering my carvings. When I came in and took off my helmet I saw on the screen:
HAVE NO FEAR, SAM IS HERE. WILL RENDEZVOUS IN ONE HOUR.
My eyes flicked to the digital clock reading. He would be here in a matter of minutes! At least this time I was wearing clothes, but still I looked a mess.
By the time his transport was hovering in a matching orbit and the pumps in my air locks were chugging, I was decently dressed in a set of beige coveralls he had not seen before, my hair was combed and neatly netted, and I had applied a bit of makeup to my face. My expression in the mirror had surprised me: smiling, nearly simpering, almost as giddy as a schoolgirl. Even my heart was skipping along merrily.
Sam came in, his helmet already off. I propelled myself over to him and kissed him warmly on the lips. He reacted in a typical Sam Gunn way. He gave a whoop and made three weightless cartwheels, literally heels over head, with me gripped tightly in his arms.
For all his exuberance and energy, Sam was a gentle, thoughtful lover. Hours later, as we floated side by side in my darkened quarters, the sweat glistening on our bare skins, he murmured:
“I never thought I could feel so . . . so. . . .”
Trying to supply the missing word, I suggested, “So much in love?”
He made a little nod. In our weightlessness, the action made him drift slightly away from me. I caught him in my arms, though, and pulled us back together.
“I love you, Sam,” I whispered, as though it were a secret. “I love you.” He gave a long sigh. I thought it was contentment, happiness even.
“Listen,” he said, “you’ve got to come over to the ship. Those two nut cases who want to paint the ionosphere are on their way to the Moralists’ habitat.”
“What does that have to do with. . . .”
“You gotta meet them,” he insisted. Untangling from me, he began to round up his clothes, floating like weightless ghosts in the shadows. “You know what those Moralist hypocrites are going to call their habitat, once it’s finished? Eden! How’s that for chutzpah?”
He had to explain the Yiddish word to me. Eden. The Moralists wanted to create their own paradise in space. Well, maybe they would, although I doubted that it would be paradise for anyone who deviated in the slightest from their stern views of right and wrong.
We showered, which in zero gee is an intricate, intimate procedure. Sam washed me thoroughly, lovingly, using the washcloth to tenderly push the soapy water that clung to my skin over every inch of my body.
“The perfect woman,” he muttered. “A dirty mind in a clean body.”
Finally we dried off, dressed, and headed out to Sam’s ship. But first he maneuvered the little scooter along the length of my asteroid.
“Doesn’t seem to be much more done than the last time I was here,” he said, almost accusingly.
I was glad we were in the space suits and he could not see me blush. I remained silent.
As we moved away from The Rememberer, Sam told me, “The lawyers aren’t having much luck with the arbitration board.” In the earphones of my helmet, his voice sounded suddenly tired, almost defeated.
“I didn’t think they would.”
“The board’s gonna hand down its decision in two weeks. If they decide against you, there’s no appeal.”
“And they will decide against me, won’t they?”
He tried to make his voice brighter. “Well, the lawyers are doing their damnedest. But if trickery and deceit won’t work, maybe I can bribe a couple of board members.”
“Don’t you dare! You’ll go to jail.”
He laughed.
As we came up to Sam’s transport ship, I saw its name stenciled in huge letters beneath the insect-eye canopy of the command module: Klaus Heiss.
“Important economist,” Sam answered my question. “Back a hundred years or so. The first man to suggest free enterprise in space.”
“I thought that writers had suggested that long before spaceflight even began,” I said as we approached the ship’s air lock.
Sam’s voice sounded mildly impatient in my earphones. “Writers are one thing. Heiss went out and raised money, got things started. For real.”
Klaus Heiss was fitted out more handsomely than Adam Smith, even though it seemed no larger. The dining lounge was more luxurious, and apparently the crew ate elsewhere. There were four of us for dinner: Sam and myself, and the two “nut cases,” as he called them.
Morton McGuire and T. Kagashima did not seem insane to me. Perhaps naive. Certainly enthusiastic.
“It’s the greatest idea since the invention of writing!” McGuire blurted as we sat around the dining lounge table.
He was speaking about their idea of painting the ionosphere with advertisements.
McGuire was a huge mass of flesh, bulging in every direction, straining the metal snaps of his bilious green coveralls. He looked like a balloon that has been overfilled to the point of bursting. He proudly told me that he was known as “Mountain McGuire,” from his days as a college football player. He had gone from college into advertising, gaining poundage every passing day. Living on Earth, he could not be classified as an agravitic endomorph. He was simply fat. Extremely so.
“I’m just a growing boy,” he said happily as he jammed fistfuls of food into his mouth.
The other one, Kagashima, was almost as lean as I myself. Quiet, too, although his Oriental eyes frequently flashed with suppressed mirth. No one seemed to know what Kagashima’s first name was. When I asked what the T stood for, he merely smiled enigmatically and said, “Just call me Kagashima; it will be easier for you.” He spoke English very well—no great surprise, since he was born and raised in Denver, U.S.A.
Kagashima was an electronics wizard. McGuire an advertising executive. Between them they had cooked up the idea of using electron guns to to create glowing pictures in the ionosphere.
“Just imagine it,” McGuire beamed, his chubby hands held up as if framing a camera shot. “It’s twilight. The first stars are coming out. You look up, and—POW!—there’s a huge red-and-white sign covering the sky from horizon to horizon: Drink Coke!”
I wanted to vomit.
But Sam encouraged him. “Like skywriting, when planes used to spell out words with smoke.”
“Real skywriting!” McGuire enthused.
Kagashima smiled and nodded.
“Is it legal,” I asked, “to write advertising slogans across the sky?”
McGuire snapped a ferocious look at me. “There’s no laws against it! The lawyers can’t take the damned sky away from us, for God’s sake! The sky belongs to everyone.”
I glanced at Sam. “The lawyers seem to be taking my asteroid away from me.”
His smile was odd, like the smile a hunter would have on his face as he saw his prey coming into range of his gun.
“Possession is nine-tenths of the law,” Sam muttered.
“Who possesses the sky?” Kagashima asked, with that Oriental ambiguity that passes for wisdom.
“We do!” snapped McGuire.
Sam merely smiled like a cat eyeing a fat canary.
At Sam’s insistence, I spent the night hours aboard his ship. His quarters were much more luxurious than mine, and since practically all space operations kept Greenwich Mean Time, there was no problem of differing clocks.
His cabin was much more than an alcove off the command module. It was small, but a real compartment, with a zipper hammock for sleeping and a completely enclosed shower stall that jetted water from all directions. We used the shower, but not the hammock. We finally fell asleep locked weightlessly in each other’s embrace, and woke up when we gently bumped into the compartment’s bulkhead, many hours later.
“We’ve got to talk,” Sam said as we were dressing.
I smiled at him. “That means you talk and I listen, no?”
“No. Well, maybe I do most of the talking. But you’ve got to make some decisions, kiddo.”
“Decisions? About what?”
“About your asteroid. And the next few years of your life.”
He did not say that I had to make a decision about us. I barely noticed that fact at the time. I should have paid more attention.
Glancing at the digital clock set into the bulkhead next to his hammock, Sam told me, “In about half an hour, I’m going to be conversing with the Right Reverend Virtue T. Dabney, spiritual leader of the Moralist Sect. Their chief, their head honcho, sitteth at the right hand of You-Know-Who. The Boss.”
“The head of the Moralists?”
“Right.”
“He’s calling you? About my asteroid?”
Sam’s grin was full of teeth. “Nope. About his worms. We’re carrying another load of ’em out to his Eden on this trip.”
“Why would the head of the Moralists call you about worms?”
“Seems that the worms have become afflicted by a rare and strange disease,” Sam said, the grin turning delightfully evil, “and the hauling contract the Moralists signed with me contains a clause that says I’m not responsible for their health.”
