Ceres Read online

  CERES

  L. Neil Smith

  Phoenix Pick

  An Imprint of Arc Manor

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  Ceres copyright © 2009/2010 L. Neil Smith. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Cover copyright © 2010 Arc Manor Publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual persons, events or localities is purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.

  Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick, Phoenix Rider, Manor Thrift and logos associated with those imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor Publishers, Rockville, Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners.

  This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.

  The Author Asserts His Moral Rights.

  ISBN (Digital Edition) 978-1-61242-008-0

  ISBN (Paper Edition): 978-1-61242-007-3

  www.PhoenixPick.com

  Great Science Fiction

  Published by Phoenix Pick

  an imprint of Arc Manor

  P. O. Box 10339

  Rockville, MD 20849-0339

  www.ArcManor.com

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  CERES

  CHAPTER ZERO: THE MASCON

  It never fails to surprise me how innovative Pallatians can be. I think it must come from the example of Wild Bill Curringer, who, for all practical purposes, invented the very planet they live on and call home. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

  She descended like an angel, from the blood-scarlet heavens high above, into a flurry of microscopic ice crystals, swirling in great spirals all about her.

  Seen through a carefully-arranged summer blizzard from a thousand feet in the air, the little crater lake didn’t look like much, but she had measured it very carefully before the first time she’d used it— this was, perhaps, the fiftieth—referring to orbital photographs. She knew that it was two thousand yards across its shortest expanse (and about the same across its longest), more than adequate for the day’s exercise.

  The light, glittering snow continued falling. It lay, where it had already settled, in a feathery, weightless blanket that spread across the smooth, hard, level surface of the frozen lake, which was surrounded everywhere by a low, natural wall. Beyond that wall lay dense forest and unnumbered perils, including dangerous animals. By the time she hovered over the lake, the color of the snowy surface a hundred feet beneath her titanium-shod toe-tips, and of the sky—and of the very air around her—had shifted to a bright and promising orange.

  These were only two of the many colors of a Pallatian sunrise.

  Climate Control had done its job perfectly. The sky was thinly overcast and she knew from orbital radar scans taken by the same folks who had made it snow for her, that the surface of the lake was solid to a depth of at least eighteen inches. She’d be baking lots of peanut butter cookies for the crew manning the giant mirrors that controlled the weather on Pallas, second largest, and first settled, of the Belt asteroids.

  Her gloves were made of the same slick and shiny material, in the same brilliant metallic blue, as the rest of her close-fitting exercise suit, which covered her from head to the soles of her boots. She brushed snow from the horizontal surfaces of what those who didn’t live on Pallas often called a “flying belt”. It was actually a toroid, more like an old-fashioned life preserver—like the ones that hung here and there on ancient ships—with two smaller toroids fused to it, 180 degrees apart. The largest toroid went around one’s waist and the smaller pair each held a powerful electrostatic grid that ionized the air and pushed it through to keep the whole device and its rider aloft.

  She had flown a very long way, mostly in pitch darkness, to be here at dawn. If she had to walk back it would probably take weeks or months.

  At fifty feet, the silent fury of her passage, of the tiny twin hurricanes holding her aloft, had begun to scour the ice until she saw herself reflected, surrounded by a gauzy halo of brilliant canary yellow, yet another color of the Pallatian morning. The effect had something to do with sunlight refracted through the asteroid’s plastic atmospheric canopy—the same phenomenon occurred at sunset, only in reverse order—but nobody seemed to know much more than that about it.

  As the serried tips of her twin gleaming blades touched the ice, she toggled the dual releases of the harness that had supported her, raised her arms gracefully above her head, and let the machine that had borne her to this place, across hundreds of miles of untamed wilderness, rise gently around her until it floated free above her head.

  Hanging in its holster from the same harness that had supported her was the ten millimeter pistol her mother had insisted that she take with her. Early in its history, Pallas had been stocked with all sorts of wildlife, including some of Earth’s most ferocious predators. To any extent that they had explained it at all, the little world’s founders had said they wanted to remind their posterity that safety is a dangerous illusion—and besides, they happened to like ferocious predators.

  At her command, the little flying machine drifted to the edge of the ice, set itself down upon the shore amidst a miniature flurry of wind-driven snow, and obligingly shut itself off to await her later need.

  By then the sky above her head, the very air around her, and the ice beneath her feet had turned to an emerald so deep and pure that it was almost enough to break her heart—except that it was perfectly normal to her, perfectly natural. She had arisen with it almost every morning of her young life—more than forty-seven hundred of them, she quickly calculated—and returned home with it almost every evening.

  As usual, she began warming up with several waltz jumps. It was an easy exercise, and she could do them in either direction—a talent fairly rare among skaters—starting off on the right foot or the left. In either case, the trick was getting up onto the toe before the jump.

  All around her, the ice, the sky above it, and the snow-covered land were all a rich, soul-rending blue.

  Suddenly she left the ice, rising twice her height into the air— a feat impossible on humanity’s homeworld—covering at least 50 feet in a long, graceful arc. At the end of it, she alighted without a sound, indulgently skimming another hundred feet before she prepared for another jump.

  Next came the Salchow, beginning with a three-turn on the takeoff. She remembered not to jump off the left back inside edge, as she was reflexively inclined to do, but to turn and jump sideways, almost, off the toepick.

  By now, everything around her was bathed in violet light.

  The trouble with her next jump, the toe loop, was the axis of its rotation. She took off on her left toepick, then had to flip her body around to change the center of her turn until it was over her right foot rather than her left.

  Now for the loop. Leg position during the jump was critical, and she had to remember to tuck the left leg over right, instead of bringing the left ankle to the right knee.

  The flip started with a Mohawk—a change from the right forward inside edge to the left backward inside edge. On the takeoff, she pointed her right toe toward the back to fight the natural tendency to start the jump by kicking down with a bent right knee.

  There were similar problems with the Lutz—a tendency to “flutz” it by taking off as with the flip, as opp
osed to being on the left backward outside edge. Instead, she put her right toepick in and jumped.

  At long last, she came to the Axel, the prize most sought after by new figure skaters, and gateway to the double jumps, The Axel was a turn and a half, and she had to fight a tendency to “pop out” after only a single rotation.

  Now, as the landscape began to be bathed in the yellow-white light that most human beings would regard as normal, she executed a double Salchow—the same moves as before, but with two rotations. Then came the double toe loop, followed by the double loop and double flip, ending the sequence with a double Lutz, and then the double Axel it had taken her a year, a thousand falls, and cost her family a hundred platinum ounces to get right.

  The double Axel—two and a half turns—led to a series of triple jumps, and those led to a series of quadruples, quintuples, and sextuples. By now she was soaring forty feet into the air, carrying with her, in her wake, a trail of powdery snow that made her think of a rocket’s climb from ground to sky. On her home ice, the rink where she’d been skating since she was an infant, this is where she had to stop—the netting over the ice and the ceiling above it interfered with further progress.

  Here, she could jump the full seventy feet she was capable of.

  She had yet to land a septuple jump, although the power was there, and Pallatian gravity permitted it. One simply became too disoriented after seven turns to land on a single foot. She had already begun working on that, however, and had vowed never to stop—it might take years; it had taken years already—until she could make a dozen turns and land cleanly.

  Finally it was time to go home. The snow had stopped falling, the ice had begun to look wet, and she had a long flight ahead of her. Touching a band on her wrist, she summoned her flying belt. Impellers humming and throwing snow—obscuring the pawprints, each the size of both her hands, of an African leopard she had been too preoccupied to notice inspecting her belongings—the device lifted itself into the air, obediently flew to her, and lowered itself over her head and shoulders.

  She fastened the support straps and pushed forward on the control stick. Rising rapidly, she punched a course into the autopilot, and watched the uncharted wilderness roll by a thousand feet below her blades.

  PART ONE: ONE TENTH GEE

  Sixty-five million years ago, the last time Earth was struck by an asteroid, everything in North America died in seconds, every tree on the planet burned, three quarters of the species then living, plant and animal, were wiped out, and the shockwave, conducted through the liquid iron core, split the crust open on the opposite side of the world, creating a range of volcanic mountains that did as much damage to the environment as the asteroid itself.

  Had that bit of rock been only a little heavier, or traveling only a little faster, it could have burst the planet open like a bullet striking an egg, and evolution would have had to start all over again.

  With the recent, tragic event at Ashland, Ohio, in East America, a badly-shaken humanity has now had a forcible reminder of its own vulnerability, as well as that of the planet it was born and evolved on. The question before our species now is, what are we going to do about it?

  —Dr. Evgeny Zacharenko Addressing the Ashland Event Commission

  Of the Solar Geological Society Curringer, Pallas, August 9, 2095

  CHAPTER ONE: GEGENSCHEIN

  Pallatians’ fear that their kids, grandkids, and great grandkids will become civilized, urbanized, and lose the values that made their culture uniquely wonderful. Someday it’ll just seem like too much trouble to maintain the “barroom justice” system that defends Pallatian individuals against governments and corporations. Too barbaric to hunt their own food. Too “macho” to carry weapons to defend themselves, their freedom, and their future. Personally, I don’t think it’ll happen. The asteroids offer too many new frontiers to conquer. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

  Mud-pie planet.

  It helped, sometimes, to remember that the broken, gray-brown surface that seemed to stretch endlessly before him, under merciless starlight, to a ragged horizon that was too far away, would be covered in lush green vegetation before another decade passed. That, the young construction worker thought, was the whole point to terraformation, after all.

  Seventeen-year-old Wilson Ngu carefully examined the indicator riptabbed to the left sleeve of his envirosuit, found the spot on the asteroid’s surface before him—the exact spot—corresponding to the reading of the instrument, and reached back, over his shoulder, for one of the transponders he carried on his back like arrows in a quiver.

  It was a tedious, unglamorous task, but absolutely necessary. He clamped the middle of the shaft into an object that looked a bit like a pistol, pressed the ion-hardened tip of the shaft against the dark, crumbly surface—it was often described as being the exact color and texture of a slightly overdone chocolate chip cookie—and pulled the trigger. Through his suit, and the bones of his arm, he could hear the tool whine and scrape as it screwed the shaft six inches into the ground. When he pressed a release button, the top of the tool opened like a clamshell and let go of the shaft. Wilson was now ready, for the thousandth time today, to look for the next exact spot to plant a transponder.

  He was “walking the tops” between craters, or “ridge-running” as it was called on his native world. On so heavily-ravaged a surface, it was the only way that made sense, on foot or driving a ground vehicle. Travelling the narrow elevations between craters avoided the necessity of going up and down constantly, and it also afforded much greater visibility. He would descend into a crater only if the survey called for it, and the survey had been designed not to, unless it was utterly unavoidable.

  Nevertheless, it was important to be precise. In a just a few more weeks, once every acre of Ceres, largest of the belt of asteroids that circled the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, had finally been dotted with a transponder like this, standing on its fiberglass shaft about three feet above the ground, giant factory ships already in orbit—he could see one of them up there right now, its running lights cheerfully blinking yellow, red, and green—would use the guidance the devices provided to cover the entire world with virtually endless sheets, half a mile wide, of tough, self-repairing “smart” plastic.

  Even that much was a monumental task, dwarfing the construction of the Egyptian pyramids or China’s fabled Great Wall. Ceres had the same surface area as the Indian subcontinent on Earth. But what came next would be even more impressive. Just as there were thousands of workmen doing the same that job he was doing now, thousands more would follow, drawing the edges of the titanic plastic strips together, using tools any carpet-layer would recognize as giant versions of his own. The strips couldn’t be more than inches apart, which was why precision in laying them was so important. The crews would weld them together with lasers and ultrasonic “torches”. In days, the fresh welds would “heal” by themselves, creating a seamless transparent covering over the whole asteroid.

  Although the materials and the technology had improved with time, the basic concept had been tested and proven three generations ago on the second largest of the asteroids, Pallas, which also happened to be the world of Wilson’s birth. Pallas “only” had the same area as the West American “Four Corners” states of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico, with about a quarter of Wyoming thrown in for good measure.

  Wilson found the next transponder location—each of the devices had a distinct digital signature that could be read from orbit—and locked a shaft into the drilling tool. The light that fell on Ceres’ surface was only a fraction of that which fell on, say, Earth’s moon, but it was bright enough to dazzle eyes adjusted to the Asteroid Belt. Boundaries between light and shadow were sharp. Once this atmospheric canopy he was helping to construct was complete, however, and filled with gases that human beings could breathe, things would be very different.

  Green grass below, blue sky above, and shadows with soft edges. Farms. And cities. He wasn�
�t altogether certain he approved of either. He planned—or at least wished—to be gone from here by then. He had reasons for his wishes. What they amounted to was a perfectly human need to leave the nest his parents had provided, strike out on his own, and make his own mark as a man. There was another reason, too, but he decided not to think about her just now—it was far too distracting.

  For just a moment, Wilson looked up at the sky, grateful for the millions of microscopic nanoscrubbers that “lived” in his helmet and kept its transparent face from fogging up. The envirosuit kept him clean, too, fed him, quenched his thirst, and protected him from solar radiation. At least half of the hard little points of light he could see, hanging against the utter blackness of space, were familiar stars. Most of the other half were asteroids, all of them smaller than Ceres and Pallas, ranging from a couple hundred miles in diameter to the size of a grain of sand. They averaged about half a mile across, and about six hundred miles apart. Not one of them twinkled. But they all would, once the plastic canopy was up over Ceres, and filled with air.

  There were planets out there, too, of course, and a hundred big factory ships, their highly-skilled, highly-paid crews already working in multiple shifts, manufacturing plastic for the canopy, rolling it onto impossibly huge spindles hanging in space beside the ships in orbit. He’d recently been aboard one of the vessels with his father—briefly, he wondered if it was the same one he was looking at now—and watched tender craft hauling raw material to it, in the form of boxcar-sized chunks of carbonaceous chondrite, the same substance that constituted most of Ceres itself. The ship’s machinery crushed these smaller asteroids, extracting kerogen (the stuff that made chondrites carbonaceous) and a surprising amount of water—six to 22 percent by mass—that was used in the fabrication process, as well as for life support.