The Venus Belt (3 page)

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 su
p
porting 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 observ
a
tories throughout the System, continue fascinated by allegedly inte
l
ligent 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 b
e
fore I’d come to the Confederacy: inarticulate groanings, mouthings of a
p
parent distress; something like intercepting single sideband on an AM radio, or listening to Dutch or Norwegian—sounds you somehow just miss u
n
derstanding. But hell, whales often make noises like they’re being slowly barb
e
cued, 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 cu
l
ture’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 infe
r
nal-combustion Brazilian-made contraptions around on concrete, sulfur, and asphalt-covered streets, it was a relief to set my fusion-powered toy on a
u
tomatic, 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 r
e
cently 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 gra
y
ing hair with wisdom, instead of what they really are: symptoms of a te
r
minal disease. Easy enough for an expatriated pundit like him to crab about “i
n
terference with another culture’s values”—he hadn’t Broached victims of those values out of torture chambers and “mental hospitals,” maimed, br
o
ken, 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 counterme
a
sures—toll-free IRS finklines, highly publicized black-market prosecutions, magnetica
l
ly 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. Amer
i
cans 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 impo
r
tant 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 S
u
mo 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 shou
l
der 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 me
l
low 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 pr
o
tective 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 doze
r
bait. Here, as in Camelot, it never snows, nor rains, nor hails, nor even sleets, except by appointment. If the mails weren’t electronic, pos
t
men’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 sate
l
lite shone brightly on the prairie. Not wanting to disturb my darling pregnant roo
m
mate, fetchingly attired in a suitably expanded scarlet c
o
verall, 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 re
c
orded instructions:
“When you hear the tone, the clock will start. Par for
El Pres
i
dente
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 di
m
ples, then returned her concentration to the matter at hand. An .11-caliber Wesley Electric hung at her waist in that goddamned suede cross-draw ho
l
ster 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 materiali
z
ing 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 mag
a
zines 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 tu
m
my. “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 Pa
l
las—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 ta
r
gets, 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, wor
k
ing 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 instru
c
tions 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 co
n
centrate.”

“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 mag
a
zine, 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.