Alternate Gerrolds (33 page)

We print out as much and as many as we want, we break the polymer at the perforations; three quick folds to give it a wing shape, and it’s done. Toss a dozen of these things overboard, they sail along on the solar wind, steering themselves by changing colors and occasional micro-bursts. Make one wing black and the other white and the plane eventually turns itself; there’s no hurry, there’s no shortage of either time or space in the belt. Every few days, the bot wakes up and looks around. Whenever it detects a mass of any kind, it scans the lump, scans it again, scans it a dozen times until it’s sure, notes the orbit, takes a picture, analyzes the composition, prepares a report, files a claim and sends a message home. Bots relay messages for each other until the message finally gets inserted into the real network. After that, it’s just a matter of finding the publisher and forwarding the mail. Average time is fourteen hours.

Any rock one of your paper planes sniffs and tags, if you’re the first then you’ve got first dibsies on it. Most rocks are dumb and worthless—and usually when your bots turn up a rock that’s useful, by then you’re almost always too far away to use it. Anything farther than five or ten degrees of arc isn’t usually worth the time or fuel to go back after. Figure fifty million kilometers per degree of arc. It’s easier to auction off the rock, let whoever is closest do the actual work, and you collect a percentage. If you’ve tagged enough useful rocks, theoretically you could retire on the royalties.
Theoretically.
Jill hates that word.

But if finding the right rock is the second-hardest part of the job, then the
first-
hardest part is finding the
other
rock, the one you use at the
other
end of the whip. If you want to throw something at Earth (and lots of people do), you have to throw something the same size in the opposite direction. Finding and delivering the right ballast rock to the site was always a logistic nightmare. Most of the time it was just difficult, sometimes it was impossible, and once in a while it was even worse than that.

We got lucky. We had found the right ballast rock, and it was in just the right place for us. In fact, it was uncommonly close—only a few hundred thousand kilometers behind Janis. Most asteroids are several million klicks away from their closest neighbor. FBK-9047 was small, but it was heavy. This was a nickel-rich lump about ten klicks across. While not immediately useful, it would
someday
be worth a helluva lot more than the comet we were tossing—five to ten billion, depending on how it assayed out.

Our
problem was that it belonged to someone else. The FlyBy Knights. And they weren’t too particularly keen on having us throw it out of the system so we could launch Comet Janis.

Their
problem was that this particular ten billion-dollar payday wasn’t on anyone’s calendar. Most of the contractors had their next twenty-five years of mining already planned out—you have to plan that far in advance when the mountains you want to mine are constantly in motion. And it wasn’t likely anyone was going to put it on their menu for at least a century; there were just too many other asteroids worth twenty or fifty or a hundred billion floating around the belt. So while this rock wasn’t exactly worthless in principle, it was worthless in actuality—until someone actually needed it.

Mom says that comet tossing is an art. What you do is you lasso two rocks, put each in a sling, and run a long tether between them, fifty kilometers or more. Then you apply some force to each one and start them whirling around each other. With comet ice, you have to do it slowly to give the snowball a chance to compact. When you’ve got them up to speed, you cut the tether. One rock goes the way you want, the other goes in the opposite direction. If you’ve done your math right, the ballast rock flies off into the outbeyond, and the other—the money rock—goes arcing around the solar system and comes in for a close approach to the target body—Luna, Earth, L4, wherever. This is a lot more cost-effective than installing engines on an asteroid and driving it home. A
lot
more.

Most of the time, the flying mountain takes up station as a temporary moon orbiting whatever planet we throw it at, and it’s up to the locals to mine it at their leisure. But this time we were only arranging a flyby—a close approach for the Summer Olympics, so the folks in the Republic of Texas could have a sixty-degree swath of light across the sky for twelve days. And that was a whole other set of problems—because the
comet’s appearance had to be timed for perfect synchronicity with the event. There wasn’t any wiggle room in the schedule. And everybody knew it.

All of which meant that we really needed this rock, or we weren’t going to be able to toss the comet. And everybody knew that too, so we weren’t in the best bargaining position. If we wanted to use 9047, we were going to have to cut the FlyBy Knights in for a percentage of Janis, which Jill didn’t really want to do because what they called “suitable recompense for the loss of projected earnings” (if we threw their rock away) was so high that we would end up losing money on the whole deal.

We knew we’d make a deal eventually—but the advantage was on their side because the longer they could stall us, the more desperate we’d become and more willing to accept their terms. And meanwhile, Mom was scanning for any useful rock or combination of rocks in the local neighborhood—approximately five million klicks in any direction. So we were juggling time, money and fuel against our ability to go without sleep. Mom and Jill had to sort out a nightmare of orbital mechanics, economic concerns and assorted political domains that stretched from here to Mercury.

Mom says that in space the normal condition of life is patience; Jill says it’s frustration. Myself…I had nothing to compare it with. Except the puberty thing, of course. What good is puberty if there’s no one around to have puberty with? Like kissing, for instance. And holding hands. What’s all that stuff about?

I was up early because I wanted to make fresh bread. In free fall, bread doesn’t rise, it expands in a sphere—which is pretty enough, and fun for tourists, but not really practical because you end up with some slices too large and others too small. Better to roll it into a cigar and let it expand in a cylindrical baking frame. We had stopped the centrifuge because the torque was interfering with our navigation around Janis; it complicated turning the ship. We’d probably be ten or twelve days without. We could handle that with vitamins and exercise, but if we went too much longer, we’d start to pay for it with muscle and bone and heart atrophy, and it takes three times as long to rebuild as it does to lose. Once the bread was safely rising—well, expanding—I drifted forward.

“Jill?”

She looked up. Well,
over
. We were at right angles to each other. “What?” A polite
what
. She kept her fingers on the keyboard.

“I’ve been thinking—”

“That’s nice.”

“—we’re going to have to ride this one in, aren’t we?”

She stopped what she was doing, lifted her hands away from the keys, turned her music down and swiveled her couch to face me. “How do you figure that?”

“Any comet heading that close to Earth, they’ll want the contractor to ride it. Just in case course corrections have to be made. It’s obvious.”

“It’ll be a long trip—”

“I read the contract. Our expenses are covered, both inbound and out. Plus ancillary coverage.”

“That’s standard boilerplate. Our presence isn’t mandatory. We’ll have lots of bots on the rock. They can manage any necessary corrections.”

“It’s not the same as having a ship onsite,” I said. “Besides, Mom says we’re overdue for a trip to the marble. Everyone should visit the home world at least once.”

“I’ve been there. It’s no big thing.”

“But
I
haven’t—”

“It’s not cost-effective,” Jill said. That was her answer to everything she didn’t want to do.

“Oh, come on, Jill. With the money we’ll make off of Comet Janis, we could add three new pods to this ship. And bigger engines. And larger fabricators. We could make ourselves a lot more competitive. We could—”

Her face did that thing it does when she doesn’t want you to know what she really feels. She was still smiling, but the smile was now a mask. “Yes, we could do a lot of things. But that decision has to be made by the senior officers of the Lemrel Corporation, kidlet.” Translation:
Your opinion is irrelevant. Your mother and I will argue about this. And I’m against it.

One thing about living in a ship, you learn real fast when to shut up and go away. There isn’t any real privacy. If you hold perfectly still, close your eyes and just listen, eventually—just from the ship noises—you can tell where everyone is and what they’re doing—sleeping, eating, bathing, defecating, masturbating, whatever. In space,
everyone
can hear you scream. So you learn to speak softly. Even in an argument. Especially in an argument. The only real privacy is inside your head, and you learn to recognize when others are going there, and you go somewhere else. With Jill…well, you learned faster than real fast.

She turned back to her screens. A dismissal. She plucked her mug off the bulkhead and sipped at the built-in straw. “I think you should talk this over with your mom.” A further dismissal.

“But Mom’s asleep, and you’re not. You’re here.” For some reason, I wasn’t willing to let it go this time.

“You already have my opinion. And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” She turned her music up to underline the point.

I went back to the galley to check on my bread. I opened the plastic bag and sniffed. It was warm and yeasty and puffy, just right for kneading, so I sealed it up again, put it up against a blank bulkhead and began pummeling it. You have to knead bread in a non-stick bag because you don’t want micro-particles in the air-filtration system. It’s like punching a pillow. It’s good exercise and an even better way to work out a shitload of frustration.

As near as I could tell, puberty was mostly an overrated experience of hormonal storms, unexplainable rebellion, uncontrollable insecurity and serious self-esteem issues, all resulting in a near-terminal state of wild paranoid anguish that caused the sufferer to behave bizarrely, taking on strange affectations of speech and appearance. Oh yeah, and weird body stuff where you spend a lot of time rubbing yourself for no apparent reason.

Lotsa kids in the belt postponed puberty. And for good reason. It doesn’t make sense to have your body readying itself for breeding when there are no appropriate mates to pick from. And there’s more than enough history to demonstrate that human intelligence goes into remission until at least five years after the puberty issues resolve. A person should finish her basic education without interruption, get a little life experience, before letting her juices start to flow. At least, that was the theory.

But if I didn’t start puberty soon, I’d never be able to and I’d end up sexless. You can only postpone it for so long before the postponement becomes permanent. Which might not be a bad idea, considering how crazy all that sex stuff makes people.

And besides, yes, I was curious about all that sex stuff—masturbation and orgasms and nipples and thighs, stuff like that—but not morbidly so. I wanted to finish my
real
education first. Intercourse is supposed to be something marvelous and desirable, but all the pictures I’d ever seen made it look like an icky imposition for
both
partners.
Why did anyone want to do
that?
Either there was something wrong with the videos, or maybe there was something wrong with me that I just didn’t get it.

So it only made sense that I should start puberty now, so I’d be ready for mating when we got to Earth. And it made sense that we should go to Earth with Comet Janis. And why didn’t Jill see that?

Mom stuck her head into the galley then. “I think that bread surrendered twenty minutes ago, sweetheart. You can stop beating it up now.”

“Huh? What? Oh, I’m sorry. I was thinking about some stuff. I guess I lost track. Did I wake you?”

“Whatever you were thinking about, it must have been pretty exciting. The whole ship was thumping like a subwoofer. This boat is noisy enough without fresh-baked bread, honey. You should have used the bread machine.” She reached past me and rescued the bag of dough; she began stuffing it into a baking cylinder.

“It’s not the same,” I said.

“You’re right. It’s quieter.”

The arguments about the differences between free fall bread and gravity bread had been going on since Commander Jarles Ferris had announced that bread doesn’t fall butter-side down in space. I decided not to pursue that argument. But I was still in an arguing mood.

“Mom?”

“What, honey?”

“Jill doesn’t want to go to Earth.”

“I know.”

“Well, you’re the captain. It’s
your
decision.”

“Honey, Jill is my partner.”

“Mom, I have to start puberty soon!”

“There’ll be other chances.”

“For puberty?”

“For Earth.”

“When? How? If this isn’t my best chance, there’ll never be a better one.” I grabbed her by the arms and turned her so we were both oriented the same way and looked her straight in the eyes. “Mom, you know the drill. They’re not going to allow you to throw anything that big across Earth’s orbit unless you’re riding it. We have to ride that comet in. You’ve known that from the beginning.”

Mom started to answer, then stopped herself. That’s another thing about spaceships. After a while, everybody knows all the sides of every argument. You don’t have to recycle the exposition. Janis was big money. Four-plus years of extra-hazardous duty allotment, fuel and delta-vee recovery costs, plus bonuses for successful delivery. So, Jill’s argument about cost-effectiveness wasn’t valid. Mom knew it. And so did I. And so did Jill. So why were we arguing?