Spring 2007 (24 page)

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“Dwarf
planet” is a misnomer. If I sit in your lap, you’re gonna feel me.

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“Plutoed”?
Has anyone ever actually used that word? Even I don’t use it, and it
happened
to me. I think it’s some sort of urban myth.

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The
worst thing about it all is that Eris feels like it’s her fault, like if she’d
never been discovered then they wouldn’t have had an excuse to kick me out.
She’s a sweet kid. She shouldn’t have to feel like it has anything to do with
her.

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Yes,
it’s cold this far out from the sun. But look, I’m mostly made of ice. I get
any closer, I’d get melty, and then suddenly I’m the size of Vesta. Then I
really
will
be a dwarf planet.

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No, no.
Some of my best friends are asteroids.

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I’ll
tell you when I think the problem started. A few years ago the director of the
Rose Center for Earth and Space asked for a favor. A big fat unethical favor. I
said to him that I was too big to fit in a jail cell but he was just the right
size, and I didn’t want that for him. He got snippy, I got snippy back, but I
thought that was that–it’s business. A little while later they do that
panorama of the solar system of theirs, and I’ve been dropped from it, and the
Rose Center spokesman is saying I’m the “King of the Trans-Neptunian Objects”
in that patronizing way of his. I should have done the director his favor and
let him rot when he got caught.

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It’s not
what you think. Just because I’m named for the god of the underworld, it
doesn’t mean I have
connections.

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I have
problems with the new definition, yeah. What is this “sweep your lane” shit?
Let me toss Eris at your planet and see what sort of job Earth does sweeping
the lane. I don’t think you’d like the result. Look, when people want you gone,
they’ll use any excuse. Simple as that.

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Also,
highly elliptical orbits are
fun.
You don’t know what you’re missing,
people.

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One
thing about something like this is you find out who your friends are. Jupiter
couldn’t have been nicer during the whole thing. Saturn’s been a real
sweetheart, too. And Neptune–well, we go way back. We’re simpatico,
always have been. But some others, eh. Not so nice.

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No, I
don’t want to name names. They know who they are.

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Oh,
fine. Mercury. I got into the club, and Mercury was suddenly my best buddy. And
I thought, well, okay–we’re close to the same size, both of us have
eccentric orbits, we’ve both got a 3:2 resonance thing going on. Similarities,
you know? So we hang out, get to know each other, fine, whatever. Then the IAU
vote comes down and I haven’t heard from him since. Like the demotion might be
catching or something. He may be right; he’s not exactly a brilliant
lane-sweeper himself.

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Evidence?
Well, you know. It’s not that he has an unusually thick iron core; it’s that he’s
got an unusually thin silicate skin. Where did the rest of it go? So much for
lane-sweeping. See, now you know why he’s so damn twitchy. A perfect example of
small planet syndrome.

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No, I
don’t have small planet syndrome. I have dwarf planet syndrome. Didn’t you get
the memo?

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You know
who else have been nice? Moons. If anyone had reason to be bitter about me
being made a planet, it was them. Hell, you can’t tell me Titan doesn’t deserve
to be a planet: He’s got an atmosphere, for God’s sake. Not one of them ever
said anything against me. The day I got demoted, Titan calls up, says “you wuz
robbed” and then tells me dirty jokes until I nearly throw up laughing. We
should swap him for Mercury.

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I have
nothing bad to say about Earth. Good planet. Friendly. Too bad you people are
making her all itchy recently. If I were her I would be considering a topical
application of a meteor right about now. You’re lucky she’s tolerant.

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One of
the good things about the whole fracas was once it was settled, Eris finally
got a permanent name. Being called “Xena” really ticked her off. She said that
when Uranus was discovered, his temporary name was “Georgium Sidus,” after King
George III of England. He got a national leader, she got a butch tv character.
I told her I didn’t really think she wanted to be named “Dubya,” and she said I
had a point. Then I said her moon would have been named “Cheney,” and then she
hit me.

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It hurts
when you’re hit by a dwarf planet. She’s bigger than me, you know.

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I would
have preferred the term “ice planet” myself. Some of the “dwarf” planets out
here are going to mess with that definition once you discover them.

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No, I
won’t tell you where they are. Find them yourself. You guys are good at that.

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Life on
other planets? You know, I’m paid really well not to comment about that.

I will say that if there is
life on other planets, that they’d wish you’d stop beaming “lite hits” music
stations into space. I’m not the only one out here who has Phil Collins issues.
Theoretically.

Fiction:
The Leopard’s Paw by Jay Lake

Standing against a deafening roar, Jacob Ervin slammed
his fists, hardened weapons as powerful as any product of the metalsmith’s art,
into the head of the leaping cat. Fangs longer than his index finger brushed so
close to his face that he could smell the rotten meat on the creature’s breath.
But his shattering blow had done its work. The head was already stove in.

He moved quickly, unsheathing his ancient poniard. The
weapon kept a marvelous edge that belied the brutish neglect of its late owner.
Ervin worked the point in under the sabretooth leopard’s front right shoulder
and gutted the beast in one great swoop. Long practice in the woods of Colorado
stood him good stead under the alien sun as he skinned the cat.

The meat he abandoned for the carrion eaters already
circling close. Let the hyenas and the vultures have it. Ervin had taken his
trophy in single combat, a fair fight of muscle against muscle, backed by a
superbly trained human intellect set against highly evolved predatory instinct.
He could afford to be generous to those who would someday clean his own bones.

Carrying the bloody hide, he smiled into the glare of
the setting sun. It would be a long run to his current camp, but the moon was
rising and the smell of the cat upon him would ward off all but the most
foolhardy animals.

###

He spent the next few days scraping and curing the hide.
Ervin had picked this particular cave for his campsite because of the saline
deposits nearby. He was not sure which of the local plants would be a good
source of tannin, so he’d fallen back on the old frontier method of
salt-curing. The thing stunk enough to bother even his prodigiously indifferent
nose, but Ervin stayed the course.

This sabretooth leopard was key to his plan to enter the
lost city of Redwater.

The Borgan tribal king had broken his word to Ervin.
Betrayed by a savage! No American man could stand for such treatment, not if he
wanted to look himself in the mirror again. Not that Ervin had seen a mirror
since coming to this world, but the principle was the same.

The mountain-walls to the north were a boundary to
everyone save those black buzzard-men who raided all the local tribes. He had
yet to find a way across the rocky barrier, but he would. In the mean time,
Ervin needed to settle his position among the savages once and for all. He had
no ambition to be their king, but neither would he be subject to their whims
and foolish taboos.

The leopard was coming along nicely. He’d boiled the
skull, for the sake of being too hurried to bury it. Ervin had never chanced to
study the taxidermist’s art, but he had some notion of what he was about. He’d
already set aside a pair of opals stolen from the Borgans to use for the leopard’s
eyes. Shame that he had no flashlight or other way of making them glow from
within. Now that the skin was drying under its load of salt, Ervin worked on
the wicker frame that would make it stand out from his body. This would
transform him into a great cat padding through the night.

Redwater was where the last temple of the leopard
priests had stood, before the savages had rebelled and thrown them down amid
fire and but blood. The curses laid upon that benighted place were legendary.
But curses meant nothing to a man as hard-driven and unforgiving of self as
Ervin was.

###

A week to the day after he had hunted and killed the
great predator, Jacob Ervin was ready to wear its pelt. The Borgans and their
fellow tribes believed that the leopard priests had been skin changers, walking
the night with claws and fangs to punish the disloyal and slay the unwary.
Ervin knew the secret of skin changing right enough–it was here in his
hand.

He slipped the wicker frame across the shoulder and
lashed the legs to his upper arms. The skull fell down over his forehead, while
he had left the skin of the neck open to provide additional concealment as it
dangled. The leopard’s pelt was heavy, but he knew the aspect he presented to
any man or beast watching was ferocious.

Ervin padded into the night, using a sort of crouched
run he had practiced. It was as close as he could get to the bounding gait of
the one of the great cats, but he reckoned that not many were going to stick
around to criticize his errors.

Only a man could stand against the leopards of these
hills, and not many men at that.

He made his practice run by night, to avoid betraying
details out of place. Tall grass which Ervin the man could simply look over
swatted Ervin the leopard in the face. A real cat would have stopped and sat
up, or maybe taken a great leap, but neither was an option for him. He cursed
the slashes the sharp plant blades opened in his skin, but kept running. He was
not a man to shirk or set aside a task once committed to it.

Jacob Ervin was a near-perfect specimen of human
development. His physique had been the envy of anatomists at the university in
Boulder when he attended college, before all the trouble started. But the human
body is not designed to run long distances bent double, especially not with
forty pounds of wicker and hide pressing down upon it.

By the time he reached the little creek which marked the
edge of what Ervin thought of as his front yard, his hips were like to kill
him, and his hands were bloody from supporting his weight. He knew he’d need to
take a few days to let the palms heal, and make some sort of hand-shoe. Running
gloves.

He stopped to drink, careful to bend down and lap like a
cat, his face to the water.

When he looked up from his refreshment, Ervin saw
another sabretooth leopard watching him carefully from the other bank, not ten
feet distant. An easy pounce for such a creature.

This was peril indeed! His poniard was back in his
cave-camp. With the wicker bound to his upper arms, Ervin could not throw the
bone-crushing punch he’d used to kill the cat from which he’d taken the skin.
That had been a carefully-set ambush, too, baited with a wounded antelope check
staked out and crying. He had been at his most prepared.

If the other cat leapt now, he was dead. By God, he’d show
it a thing or two! Ervin tilted his head back and roared, the astonishing
projective power of his massive lungs creating an unholy screech that woke the
night-roosting birds amid the nearby reeds.

The other cat roared back at him, then turned to pad off
into the moonlight.

Victory, even without force of arm, was still victory.
Ervin’s steps were lighter on the way back to his fire, though he took more
care with his hands, avoiding the tall grass as much as possible.

By damn, he
was
the leopard, wasn’t he? Sometimes
a man had to allow himself a little pride, he thought.

#

Six days later, at the new moon, Ervin stood on a ridge
and looked down upon his goal. Redwater’s cyclopean ruins were no more than
bulking shadows by starlight. The river that threaded out of the shattered city
was a darker line amid the black grass.

Ervin had brought his leopard skin here by travois, two
day’s march. It had taken him the days between to heal his hands and make the
hand-boots. Now he shrugged his way into the wicker frame with practiced ease,
lacing the arm stays. He saved the hand-boots til last. He was rather proud of
the leopard spoor he’d worked in the palms.