Clarke County, Space Read online

  Suzuki looked up into the impassive face of the intruder. “Golem …” he said.

  Without a word, the intruder slapped the gun’s barrel into the palm of Suzuki’s upraised right hand and squeezed the trigger. There was a soft whufff! as a tiny sliver was fired into the FBI agent’s hand.

  “Yow!” Suzuki jerked back from the sudden sting. It was the last thing he ever said.

  Two cc’s of sea wasp venom—the secretion of a jellyfish found only in the Indian Ocean off the Australian coast, the rarest and most lethal natural poison known to man—was already coursing through his bloodstream. Within seconds it entered his heart. Suzuki’s eyes widened as his heart began to beat wildly out of control. Gasping, he clutched at his chest and sagged against the back wall of the phone booth until, half a minute after the dart had been fired into his hand, he collapsed and died.

  The intruder caught Suzuki with his gloved hands and carefully settled his corpse onto the booth’s seat. He looked over his shoulder to make sure he had not been seen, then he quickly and artfully positioned the dead man’s arms, legs, and head so that it appeared as if Suzuki was just another exhausted commuter catching a few quick winks in a phone booth. When the FBI agent’s body was eventually discovered and examined, it would seem as if Suzuki had suffered a fatal cardiac arrest. The dart itself would dissolve within ten minutes; only a thorough autopsy would reveal the tiny puncture mark in his right hand.

  The Golem pocketed his hospital-issue sedative gun; made of plastics and protected with a computer-fouling stealth chip in its handle, it had passed through the smartgate without raising any alarms. He then reached into Suzuki’s coat pocket and retrieved the agent’s datapad. He tucked it into the inside pocket of his own jacket, and stripped off his gloves and carefully backed out of the phone booth.

  He shut the door of the booth, then strolled down the concourse without looking back. The United Airlines jet was taxiing away from Gate 27 as the killer reached the main terminal; by the time Suzuki’s body was discovered by someone impatient to use the phone, the Golem would be long gone from St. Louis International Airport.

  The Golem knew that Macy Westmoreland was aboard the plane, unreachable by him. But the G-man had found something and put it into his datapad; that information would make it easy for the organization to track down the boss’s girl. She’d got a small headstart, but nothing more.

  The Golem was a soldier who only carried out orders. This time, though, he hoped he was the one who got tapped for the inevitable wet job.

  He had to admit it to himself. He enjoyed his line of work.

  2

  The Coyote Dream

  (Friday: 6:59 P.M.)

  In an elliptical orbit that varies between 100,000 and 200,000 miles from Earth, Clarke County glides through the darkness of cislunar space like an enormous, elaborate child’s top. From a distance, it’s nearly impossible to appreciate the size of the artificial world, for there is nothing else nearby to which one can compare it. Closer, though, with tiny OTVs and zero g “free-flier” factories parked in orbit around it, the vastness of the space colony becomes overwhelmingly apparent. With an overall length of 5,250 feet—just shy of a statute mile—and the broadest width, the circumference of its bowl-like central primary mirror, of 2,937 feet, the colony is dwarfed only by the solar power satellites in geosynchronous orbits closer to Earth.

  Even so, Space Colony LH-101US is more staggering than the thirteen-mile-long SPS satellites. The powersats, after all, are unmanned solar collectors, while the first true space colony is home to thousands of people. Essentially a Bernal sphere, surrounded at each end by torus clusters arrayed along axial shafts, solar vanes and giant mirrors, Clarke County is the largest space station ever successfully built. The Great Pyramids of Egypt could be constructed within the biosphere, and the largest skyscrapers on Earth would all be diminished in stature if Clarke County were to be brought home.

  Yet engineering feats are one matter and the human condition is quite another. People have lived together in communities for thousands of years, but no one has yet built a successful Utopia. You can transform sterile, cold lunar rock into air and water, living soil and comfortable houses, a new sky and a new home, but you can’t so easily change human beings. In every town there are as many stories as there are the people who make up the community: some good, some bad, some absurd, and some that are best left untold.

  Technology changes, and each age develops its own miracles. People, however, are as noble, ornery, vile, and downright weird as they always were.

  Same as it ever was …

  John Bigthorn sat on the front steps of the Big Sky town hall and waited for the sun to go down. It was the end of his duty shift; he had left one of his deputies, Lou Bellevedere, in charge of the cop shop, with a warning not to try to call him with any problems, because he was taking off his beltphone. It was dinner time and the town square was nearly vacant. Across the square, Ginny DeMille was closing the doors of Ginny’s Café. She spotted the sheriff through the window of her little restaurant and waved to him, and Bigthorn was waving back when the alarm on his watch beeped.

  Bigthorn mentally counted back from five, and at the exact instant his countdown reached zero, night fell on Clarke County. As the colony’s halo orbit brought it once again behind Earth’s shadow, a wave of darkness started on the eastern hemisphere of the biosphere, above his head, and quickly raced down the walls of the world as a solid terminator line. As nightfall moved across the habitat, it left behind sparks and ovals of light as photosensitive timers switched on house and street lights. Finally the terminator line reached Big Sky, and as it raced across the square the street lamps turned on as the bell in the meeting hall steeple chimed seven times. From the far-off livestock sector in the Southwest quad, on the opposite side of the biosphere, he could dimly hear the roosters crowing. Directly above his head, from the promenade outside the LaGrange Hotel, the touristas attending the daily Sundown Cocktail cheered and clapped their hands. In space, there’s no such thing as a tequila sunset. Without a twilight time, night had come to Clarke County.

  Bigthorn rose from the steps, pulled his dayback over his left shoulder, and began walking out of Settler’s Square, passing a statue cast from a solid hunk of lunar aluminum. “The Final Shift,” the statue was named: an exhausted-looking beamjack in space armor, helmet dangling from his right hand, staring upwards in perpetual awe at the artificial sky of the world he had helped build. A plaque at the base of the statue was etched with the names of the forty-seven men and women who had died—so far—during the construction of the colony. Every few weeks the sun rose to find that someone had climbed up on the statue during the night to place a pair of sunglasses on its face, crazily changing the Lost Beamjack’s lonesome courage into blissed-out goshwow.

  As Bigthorn left the square behind and walked down Western Avenue to cross the Heinlein Bridge above the New Tennessee River, a New Ark member driving a fertilizer cart stopped to offer him a lift. Bigthorn climbed into the passenger seat and the electric cart whirred the rest of the way off the bridge, down the sand-paved road into the relative darkness of the South hemisphere. Here, the only illumination came from the ankle-high lights lining the road. About halfway to South Station, where the farmer was destined to park his cart for the night at the agricultural center, Bigthorn got the longhaired man to let him off on the side of the road. The New Ark farmer didn’t ask questions as he braked the cart, only wished him a good evening. People knew about Bigthorn’s occasional retreats to his hogan on Rindge Hill.

  The hill was a hill in name only—little more than an ornamental mound that rose a couple of hundred feet above the serried rows of double-planted corn and potatoes, covered with a small glade of maple and elm trees. Once he had carefully made his way through the croplands, Bigthorn climbed the hill in the darkness, disdaining the use of the flashlight hooked to his uniform belt, until he reached the hogan.

  It was a low, six-sided cabin with a
single door through which he had to bend almost double to enter. There was a round hole in the ceiling and no windows; its design was identical to the traditional Navajo hogan. It differed only in that it was not built of logs. Cut timber was too costly to be shipped from Earth, and the biosphere’s transplanted trees were too few and too valuable to be used as lumberstock. Instead, like almost every other house-sized building in the colony, the hogan was built of bamboo.

  It had taken a lot of quibbling with the County Zoning Board to get them to allow the sheriff to build his hogan in the farm section. The three-member board, for a while, insisted that he place it in the postage-stamp backyard behind his house in Big Sky, or in Challenger Green, the small public park in LaGrange. The problem with both sites, which the board myopically couldn’t see, was that they afforded little privacy. Especially Challenger Green, where he would have been pestered and photographed by tourists. Bigthorn had no desire to make a weekly appearance as a sideshow attraction. Come see Chief Runnamuck perform his sacred peyote ceremony; free admission, no camera-flashes allowed, postcards available at the souvenir stand.

  Fortunately the New Ark, which was in charge of the colony’s agricultural project, recognized that as a Native American he needed a place for spiritual retreat. They had taken his side against the Board, and finally a compromise was reached: Bigthorn was given a small plot of land on Rindge Hill, on the condition that it not be permanently inhabited.

  Thus the hogan was completely bare except for a small fire-pit in the middle of the packed-earth floor, a little pile of cedar twigs in the corner, and the fire extinguisher which was kept there in compliance with the usual safety codes. Bigthorn closed the door, gathered some of the twigs and racked them together in the pit, lighted them with a match, then unzipped his dayback. After unrolling a small wool blanket next to the pit, he began to undress in the flickering light of the fire.

  John Bigthorn was impressive when fully dressed. Naked, he was almost breathtaking, six and a half feet of solid muscle under dark red skin, an apparition of the fierce nomadic raiders who had been the forerunners of the agrarian Navajo nation. No one was there to admire him, and if there had been any visitors, he would have used his authority to shoo them away. A Navajo sweat-bath is not meant to be seen by Anglo eyes.

  However, his hogan was sometimes used for purposes other than his sweats. Teen-agers, for instance, occasionally appropriated the hut for their own rites of passage; more than once he had found empty wine bottles and used condoms on the floor. He didn’t really mind, since a hogan is only a windowless shack when not being used by one of the Dineh, the People. No used rubbers were on the floor this time, so either Big Sky’s kids were getting less adventurous or they were once again sowing their wild oats down on the Strip. Bigthorn made a mental note to pay a visit to the Chateau L’Amour. If the whorehouse was admitting underage tricks again, he’d have to suspend Bonnie’s brothel license.…

  Bigthorn shut his eyes and settled cross-legged on the blanket. Time to stop thinking like a cop. He breathed in the fragrance of the cedar smoke, felt the rising heat begin to open his pores, heard the fire gently snapping in front of him. He sat with his back stiffly erect for a long time, long trails of cool sweat oozing off his face and chest. He let his mind empty and his body relax, and after a while he decided that he was ready to dream.

  Out of the pack came a leather flask of water and a sealed plastic bag. He took a sip from the water, then unsealed the bag. Inside was a small, pale yellow peyote button, broken off the stem this morning from the potted rows of peyote cacti he secretly cultivated in his house.

  The first time he had taken peyote he had been eighteen years old and living in Lukachukai, his hometown on the reservation. On his eighteenth birthday his grandfather had escorted him to the lodge in the rocky hills above his hometown, where elders of the town’s Native American Church had gathered that night to celebrate his passage into manhood. Such is the difference between the Dineh and the Anglos. The white man makes his rite of passage by screwing a cheerleader in the parking lot, the red man by eating peyote and walking tall with the spirits.

  “This isn’t meant for gringo hippies,” Grandfather Abe had told him inside the lodge, pressing the fleshy button into his hand. “The Great Spirit gave the peyote to the Dineh so that they could have the means to walk with him before they died, to see beyond this world. It’s not dope to be taken for kicks, Johnny. It is a holy sacrament, just as the white man drinks wine and eats bread in his church. The only good thing that bastard, Richard Nixon, ever did was to make peyote legal for us so the DEA wouldn’t bust our heads.”

  “Who’s Richard Nixon?” he had asked.

  “Shut up and eat your peyote,” Grandfather Abe had replied.

  Fifteen years later, John Bigthorn took another peyote button and crammed it into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully on its foul-tasting tenderness. He swallowed the pulp and washed it down with another swig of water. Then he sat and stared into the low flames, letting the sweat drip off his forehead into the fire.

  He had fasted all day in preparation for his sweat, but as usual the peyote made him sick. Nauseous, he managed to crawl out of the hogan before puking next to a tree. It was cold outside the hogan, so he crawled on hands and knees back into the hut, forgetting to close the door behind him. He was weak now. A dim electric current buzzed behind his eyeballs. Guts cramped, unable to sit upright, he sprawled on the blanket and stared up at the ceiling, watching the smoke from the fire as it drifted up through the chimney hole, wafting out into the darkness.

  Presently, he rose with the smoke and soared upwards, through the hole, out of the hogan, into the fishbowl world of Clarke County. Rising on a thin thermal like an eagle, his eyes swept over the dark centrifugal countryside. Below him, beyond the dark curving band of the river, lay the lighted streets and houses of Big Sky, spread out like a neon sand painting.

  He continued to rise, nearing the axial center of the biosphere, passing the taut cables of the Gold Line axis tram, and his eyes followed the New Tennessee River as it traveled upwards along the equator to the East hemisphere above his head. Up there—now below him—lay the brighter lights of LaGrange, where rich touristas like the ones who used to bargain with Grandmother Sally for her blankets and silverwork prowled the overpriced shops surrounding O’Neill Square or sipped expensive drinks on the hotel promenade.

  Now he was in the center of the world. Physical laws dictated that he should have remained there, suspended in gravitational equilibrium, but he was no longer part of the physical plane. Instead, he passed through the axis and continued to soar towards LaGrange, his arms and legs outstretched. He could see, under the street lights, tiny figures walking, riding bicycles, sitting on their porches. He wondered why those who happened to look up could not see him, a naked Indian flying through the sky. The thought was hysterically funny and he laughed aloud. His laughter echoed around the world, unheard as much as he was unseen. I fly, I am invisible. Get as drunk as you can, wealthy white people, but you’ll still never be able to do this.…

  Then he felt his attention being drawn, almost involuntarily, away from LaGrange towards the farm zones in the South hemisphere. His flight was taking him away from people into the dark emptiness above the livestock area. Looking down, he saw movement on Eastern Avenue in the Southwest quad. An animal was on the road, visible in the lights, and he wondered if one of the goats or pigs had managed once again to escape from the grazing lands. As he swept closer, quickly descending, he realized that the animal was neither a pig nor a goat.

  It was Coyote.

  Coyote sat on his haunches and waited until Bigthorn dropped lightly to his feet on the road a few yards away. You’re the guy who keeps the law, right? Coyote asked.

  “Yes, I am,” Bigthorn replied.

  Hmm. White man’s law. Coyote absently scratched behind his ear with his right hind leg. Can’t even keep the fleas out of this place. Well, listen, there’s danger on its way here.
You’d better come with me. I need to show you what’s going on before it’s too late.

  Coyote stood up and began to walk away, heading south up the road. Bigthorn hesitated. Coyote was the great trickster. One could never trust him completely. He had managed to deceive the frog people out of their water, after all, and he had seduced Spider Man’s wife. But Coyote seldom lied outright, or at least not to one of the Dineh. If he said there was some sort of danger, there was probably a grain of truth in his words.

  Bigthorn followed Coyote until they reached South Window, the broad band of thick lunar-glass panes that stretched entirely around the southern half of the biosphere. They stepped over the rail and walked together out onto the window—in the back of his mind Bigthorn knew that Henrietta’s Heroes, the window-cleaning crew, would be pissed off when they found his footprints on the glass—until Coyote stopped.

  Okay, Coyote said, look down there.

  He looked down. Through the window, reflected in the polish of the South secondary mirror, the stars wheeled past, planets and constellations and distant galaxies moving in parade as Clarke County rotated on its axis. Coyote sat back a few feet, watching him expectantly.

  It was beautiful, but it was nothing Bigthorn hadn’t seen before. “What am I supposed to be looking for?” he asked.

  Numb nuts, Coyote replied. Give ’em eyes, tell ’em there’s a big problem, show ’em where it’s at, and they’re still too stupid to see for themselves. Remarkably, Coyote spoke with the voice of Bigthorn’s grandfather. He raised a paw and jabbed it at the window. Look for a star that’s moving differently from the others, you stupid turd.

  Bigthorn peered carefully at the turning starscape. Yes, there was a star moving on a different track from the rest. It gained brilliance as it grew closer, began to evolve in a more angular shape. He realized that it was an approaching spacecraft.