The Venus Belt Read online

  Far across the stadium-size terminal, a giant holo applauded KINGSLEY’S PENNSYLVANIA WHISKEY—THE DRINK THAT MAKES YOU DRUNK! Truthful and to the point, especially for brand-new refugees from a hundred Prohibitions. After a couple days in my native land, always more narrow and depressed than I usually remembered, I could use a drink, myself. Even Kingsley’s Pennsylvania Crude.

  Along the shining concourse, other agents, spies and smugglers, emerged the same way I’d just done, the familiar flash and pop! announcing them. Even more departed, laden with equipment, trade-goods, bound for a million secluded phone booths, jungle clearings, and “deserted” warehouses. Elsewhere, automated Broaches fed radio signals and printed propaganda which would appear out of nowhere anywhere from Salt Lake City to Peking Square. Huge freight machines rumbled in another portion of the Terminal.

  I’d had a lot of doubts, initially, about the infiltration of my country, and I’m still wrestling with the moral ones. Hell, no one’s ever certain, but unless all human aspirations are to bog down in a syrupy fog of second guessing, we have to push on. Whatever the consequences may be, the alternative’s worse. What bothered me originally was logistics: thanks to Gallatin’s successors, the Continental Congress is little more than a ritual, hasn’t convened in over a decade, and likely never will again. No taxes, no regulation of any kind (all that got settled, with George Washington’s hash, back in 1794), so how do you scrape up enough valuta and person-power to subvert the universe next door?

  Well, Kingsley’s Whiskey, for example, could use a few billion new customers—it’s pretty much a one-time purchase—and so could Laporte Paratronics, Securitech, Ltd., Neova Hovercraft. It’s a new twist on the concept of industrial espionage: Confederate entrepreneurhood wants a free market established in America sometime yesterday afternoon if possible. Shucks, this latest caper of mine was for an old respected chain of family pornographers.

  Forget “redeeming social value,” dirty pictures are fun. When I die I want my ashes sprinkled over a nudist camp.

  I waved back at a couple of operatives I knew as they vanished into a Broach. Their specialty was stopping counterfeiters—the kind that grind out bushel basketsful on government printing presses. Sure hoped they’d be careful with all those blasting caps.

  The less-reasonable satrapies of my homeworld are getting even shorter shrift. I remember reading about World War II, when the Allies dropped millions of crude single-shot “Liberator” .45s to European partisans. Stamped out by General Motors for $1.71 apiece, each pistol came with a bubblegum comic illustrating its operation and purpose: sneak up behind Herr Nazi, blow away his mind, trash the disposable zipgun, and appropriate the enemy’s Mauser or P38. We’re pursuing identical tactics via Broach, with substantially more sophisticated but equally inexpensive hardware. Next time the Russians “discipline” Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan, they’re in for a humiliating shock.

  So, for that matter, are the Israelis.

  I hopped onto a walkway and rode upstairs a couple of levels into a more conventional underground intersection. Colorfully dressed shoppers gawked briefly at my otherworldly shirt and tie, beat-up felt hat, gray tubular suit, and comfortable brown loafers. (Once a cop, always a cop—had to change before I went out to the club.) Then, perhaps remembering the terminal below, they went about their business, respecting my fundamental right to unmolested eccentricity.

  I found a Telecom and punched our combination. Clarissa’s a blonde, sort of cuddly and golden, with eyes that are difficult to label: green, hazel, something like that; they change. Her features welled up in three dimensions before the flat white screen, but I hardly got a word in—

  “This is Clarissa Olson-Bear, or rather a recording of me. I’m not home right now, and Win’s...out of town. Please call our professional numbers for referrals or messages—and if you’re a house burglar, you’ll be interested to hear we’re covered by Griswold’s Security.”

  Brr. I was almost afraid of them myself. Their company motto wasn’t quite “We Don’t Take Prisoners,” but they gave that impression. Too bad Captain Forsyth, our old Professional Protectives man, had retired last year.

  I diddled with the keyboard again, my Neova HoverSport answered with a cheery loyal Honk! I gave it some instructions and escalated on up into the Confederate sunshine. Standing at the fancy pastel curbing, I looked over my shoulder. The foothills west, outside the kindly influence of Cheyenne Ridge Power & Climate, were buried under three feet of wet slush. Yechhh.

  Given its head, the little Neova’s a conservative driver, so I had some minutes to kill. There was a Turner Vendicom right in front of me, its supporting post anchored in the rubbery curbside. I fumbled for a copper, dropped it in, and let the seat unfold, flipping channels randomly as I got comfortable.

  Must be news time somewhere.

  The little screen seemed to expand before my eyes. “—at radio observatories throughout the System, continue fascinated by allegedly intelligent signals originating in the constellation Cygnus. A spaceship would require hundreds of years to get out there and see what’s really going on, but in the meantime, here’s commentary on this baffling phenomenon by Channel 1572’s resident philosopher, Rod Mac—”

  Click! No point listening to that jerk. This stuff was stale news years before I’d come to the Confederacy: inarticulate groanings, mouthings of apparent distress; something like intercepting single sideband on an AM radio, or listening to Dutch or Norwegian—sounds you somehow just miss understanding. But hell, whales often make noises like they’re being slowly barbecued, and that’s when they’re having a party. Ask me, it’s interstellar swamp gas.

  I turned to channel 1789: “—unethical and imprudent,” declared the sober tones of the System’s premier newscaster—and self-styled Voice of the Stars. He nodded his fatherly gray head into the camera. “Centuries may pass before the final results are in, but interference with another culture’s values, the right of the United States to take whatever course it chooses no matter how we disapprove, endangers fundamental balances no human, simian, or cetacean truly understands. We may have reason to regret such tampering. At least that’s the way it looks, Tuesday, February twenty-third, 223 A.L. This is Voltaire Malaise, Ceres Central, good night.”

  Good night, Voltaire, and good timing. The HoverSport pulled up and I poured myself in. After two days manhandling smelly rubber-tired infernal-combustion Brazilian-made contraptions around on concrete, sulfur, and asphalt-covered streets, it was a relief to set my fusion-powered toy on automatic, feel its electrostatic impellers fluff the skirt out, whisking me home along the green and grassy thoroughfares of Laporte.

  I checked the routing program and grimaced. No wonder the car had taken so long. It’d come by way of the McKinley Bypass, whose owners recently had gone on an irrational STAY ALIVE—DRIVE 85 kick. Another week of that and they’d be in receivership. I reprogrammed the Neova and goosed up to a safe and proper hundred and ten.

  That’s Jeffersonian metric miles per hour.

  Voltaire Malaise: funny how the public, even in a country geared to three or four centuries’ life expectancy, still associates wrinkles and graying hair with wisdom, instead of what they really are: symptoms of a terminal disease. Easy enough for an expatriated pundit like him to crab about “interference with another culture’s values”—he hadn’t Broached victims of those values out of torture chambers and “mental hospitals,” maimed, broken, Thorazined out of their skulls.

  I had.

  My world had been a fucked-up mess before the Confederacy butted in: depression, hyperinflation, stultifying regulations, and continuous brushwar to distract the gullible. People fought back: fully half the economy had gone to underground barter, but hysterical government countermeasures—toll-free IRS finklines, highly publicized black-market prosecutions, magnetically coded neobucks, and finally, the feds’ last desperate grab, the Value-Added Tax—had ground the wheels of national survival to a tooth-rending halt.

 
Maybe I even agreed with old Voltaire on a couple of points. Americans needed the help they were getting, but was it right to keep it secret? Malaise insisted the Confederacy’s real frontier was outward; he’d gone so far as to move his entire operation to the asteroids. Nowadays, half the folks I knew seemed to be following his example. I even caught myself daydreaming about it.

  But hell, I was happy as a clam in Laporte with Clarissa, and my work—unethical and imprudent though it may be—was going to be important for a long while. The U.S.A. wasn’t out of the woods yet.

  ***

  626 Genêt Place, and home. I tripped out of the shower, fresh and dry, and lasered off a few whiskers, admiring myself in the mirror. Not bad for fifty-nine—in fact, not bad for thirty-nine, thanks to Confederate medicine. The minor bulges here and there lent me a little dignity, I thought. God knows I needed it at five feet seven and an eighth. And a full head of bushy black hair didn’t hurt, either—when I’d blown into this universe, it’d been with a rapidly retreating fringe of gray. So I looked like an underweight Sumo wrestler; Clarissa said I was handsome, and her word was good enough for me.

  I changed into conventional baggy pants and poncho, pulled on hand-tooled gaucho boots, and switched my .41 Magnum from the shoulder rig to a wide, comfortable gunbelt. It’s an elderly Model 58, a spare, no-nonsense punkin’-roller whose original bluing has long since worn through to a mellow gray patina. Since this was golf day, I pocketed some extra rounds of the special 240-grain load I prefer, grabbed a box of snake-charmers for the tricky shots, and went back down to the garage.

  Owl Canyon Country Club nestles at the foot of Cheyenne Ridge where potent unseen thermals from the fusion power plant enhance the protective nature of the hogback nature provided. In another universe, there’s often dry footing in Fort Collins when Denver’s up to its asshole in dozerbait. Here, as in Camelot, it never snows, nor rains, nor hails, nor even sleets, except by appointment. If the mails weren’t electronic, postmen’d have a cushy job.

  I found Clarissa and Captain Forsyth at the third green, affectionately nicknamed El Presidente. It was just going dusk, but a utility satellite shone brightly on the prairie. Not wanting to disturb my darling pregnant roommate, fetchingly attired in a suitably expanded scarlet coverall, I leaned back against a Greyhound-size boulder, torched up a stogie, and watched her getting ready. At her right, a telecom extension was just winding up its recorded instructions: “When you hear the tone, the clock will start. Par for El Presidente is ten seconds. Take your position.”

  Easiest green on the whole course. As the rules demand, Clarissa turned her back to the fairway, lifting her arms above her shoulders. She caught me loitering against the rock, lighted up about a megawatt’s worth, with dimples, then returned her concentration to the matter at hand. An .11-caliber Wesley Electric hung at her waist in that goddamned suede cross-draw holster I’ve been trying to talk her out of for years. Hard convincing her, since she’s faster on the draw than I am.

  The Telecom went Boop! Clarissa wheeled gracefully, pistol materializing in her hands before the man-shaped plastic silhouettes—three of them, in hard-to-pick-up camouflage—finished popping erect.

  Pffft! Pffft! Pffft! The linear-induction weapon ripped each target twice, shock waves from its tiny ultrasonic projectiles blasting through the buff-colored plastic. She reloaded in a twinkling of highly competent fingers, compliant to the six-shot rule (despite its basic stupidity—Webley magazines contain two hundred inch-long steel needles), and raked each target twice again. Time: 5.47 seconds, faster than I’d ever seen her; potential motherhood wasn’t slowing her down a bit. Score: the Telecom read fifty-six, four points shy of perfect.

  “Oh, shit!” observed my refined, genteel wife. “Win, you’re home!” To negate any possible connection between this pair of statements, she came running before I could caution her not to, and threw her arms around me. I felt her weapon bobble against my shoulder blades where it dangled from her fingers. Forsyth stared discreetly into the distance, a old-fashioned monkey if ever there was one.

  We came up for air, and I patted her well-rounded five-month tummy. “I trust you’re skipping the obstacle course today?”

  “Who’s the Healer around here? Of course I’m skipping obstacles, silly, why do you think we’re over here on the baby course?” Before I could get in the obvious rejoinder, she added, “Now say hello to the Captain, and take your shot. We’ll average scores and spot you ten points.”

  “Better make it twenty, I’ve had a hard couple of days. How y’doing, Cap?” I shook hands with the pistol-champ emeritus of Greater Laporte, gin-rummy shark par excellence, and one of my oldest, closest friends. He’s also a fully qualified chimpanzee.

  “All right, I guess.” He didn’t really speak: chimpanzees can’t. Instead he used a wristwatch-size synthesizer that picked up subliminal muscular movements and translated them into speech. “Nobody told me retirement was such bloody hard work! Be glad to get rid of this arthritis, though. Sorry I left it so long. Win, as soon as I’m through rejuvenating, I’m thinking about going back into business on my own. Ceres, maybe Pallas—need a partner, maybe.”

  “That does it. We’re going to have to emigrate if we ever want to see our friends again. How about it, sweetheart, once the baby comes?”

  “Why wait? Take your shot, and we’ll do it right now!”

  “In front of the Captain, here? It’s only been two days, honey, and he embarrasses so easily.” I waggled my cigar and did obscene things with my eyebrows.

  “Oh shut up and take your shot!”

  I like a girl who turns that color. I clamped the cigar firmly in my teeth, stepped up and waited through the instructions, back to the targets, hands above my shoulders—Boop!—and turned, feet planted wide, elbows locked, left arm pulling back. The front sight rose to the 5-ring.

  Blam, Blam! Blam, Blam! Blam, Blam! I thumbed the cylinder open, working the ejector-rod with my left palm. My right hand found a loader at my belt and slammed the fresh rounds home. I gripped again and snapped the weapon closed. Blam, Blam! Blam, Blam! Blam, Blam! Score: a perfect sixty. Time...

  Eight and a half seconds? Well, you can’t have everything.

  I reloaded once again, scrounging up my precious hand-imported brass, and stepped to the line to join my companions, who still had their hands over their ears.

  “You ever gonna trade that plague-eaten noise-maker off?” Forsyth gave me the sourest of looks. “If muzzle-blast was stopping-power, son, you’d be the deadliest gunman in North America!” He stepped forward, limbering up his well-worn .476 Savage, and turned toward us, disregarding the instructions as he waited for the tone. “Bloody firecracker!”

  “He never listens on that subject, Cap, I’ve been trying for years to— Oops! The baby just moved—probably covering her ears, too!”

  I put a gentle arm around my mate. “Hush, the Captain’s trying to concentrate.”

  “I’ll concentrate better when my ears stop ringing! Apologize to your daughter, Win, otherwise she may not want to come into the—”

  Boop! Forsyth spun around and drew his autopistol, ripping through six rounds so fast I could hardly tell them apart. He dropped the empty magazine, rammed home a spare, and zipped through another quick six. Score: sixty, of course. Time: four and a tiny fraction seconds.

  Arthritis be damned, remind me never to get the Captain really riled.

  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 Laporte, possibly unique in all the Confederacy.

  “And that’s another thing,” she told him. “How any civilized being tolerates 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 pret
ends not to sometimes, and understands how an old cop’s habits die hard. I limped dramatically to the Telecom and undedicated it. There, relayed from our machine at home, was another 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 outrageous 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, Edward William Bear—my own counterpart in this world. Lucy had gotten well, regained her youth, hitched up with Ed, and moved out to the asteroids. 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’ dummy—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.