I don’t want to overdo this about how hard it is to do things in the colonies—that’s not my point—but a simple little annual festival like you’d run with maybe fifteen or twenty volunteers back on a planet is not so simple on the inside of a hollow ball with a gravity gradient from zip to norm. Take parades. LaPorte-Centro-501 was built in two helices, like most of the cored colonies. The only way to route a parade all through town is rim to core to rim again in the other helix pattern, and that means everything has to go through all the gravity gradients twice. Ever try to design a float for variable gravity, not to mention spin? We keep the kiddy parades in near-normal gravity, all around the base of Alpha Helix one year, and Beta the next, and run the main parade from 0.25 to 0.25 through the core. That way the floats really float, but they don’t have to contend with heavy stress.
Right now the parade entries were looking a bit thin. Central Belt Mining & Exploration would have a float: they always did. Usually it was something “pioneering,” an adventure still-life. FARCOM would bring a communications satellite mounted on a robotic flying horse (they alternated that one and a float with two robots using tin cans and a string). Holey Bey, our nearest neighbor (and a nasty neighbor, for that matter), was sending two floats, they said. I scowled at that, and wondered if they were going to try to smuggle in another gang of ruffians. Four years ago they’d disrupted our parade with screaming youths in blood-red hotsuits who made off with parts of other people’s floats. Almost cost us the whole profit of the festival. (I know, you’ve seen Holey Bey’s brochures in the colonial offices: that fake beach, with luscious bathing beauties backed by handsome neo-Moorish arches. Forget it. Their chief engineer was a drunken incompetent who couldn’t hook one helix with another, their plumbing leaks, and they’re infested with mammalian vermin. Even dogs. I know; I took our float over there for “Back to Bey Days” and it was disgusting.)
Anyway, we had to have at least sixty entries to make the main parade work. Sixty full-size entries. No matter how you handle core, it’s big, and a parade can look pretty damn puny out there, drifting across the very-low-gee gap. Back on Earth you get horse freaks to fill in the gaps with horses (at least I suppose that’s why they’re in parades, to fill up the gaps: they have that advantage of turning sideways to take up less room, or lengthways to take up more). But of course we don’t have horses on LaPorte-Centro-501, and even Holey Bey wouldn’t harbor big dirty mammals like that. I called up the parade file, added today’s entries, and muttered. Thirty-nine, and five of those were small marching groups. I looked at the schedule for our float to see who might come.
That’s how it works, of course. We send our float (“Miss LaPorte-Centro-501 and her Court… Rolling Along to Wheel Days”) to other colonies’ festivals, and they send theirs to us. Back to Bey Days. Rockham Cherry Festival (they don’t have cherries, but it sounds good). Pioneer Days (two a year, one at each end of the settlement, and very different: Vladimir Korsygyn-233 is a Soviet colony). It’s about like you’d see on Earth: every colony has its festival, and everybody sends a float. There are differences, to be sure. We don’t actually send our float everywhere; the shipping fees would break us. We send a holo of the new design each year and hire a construct crew in whatever colony it is. Miss LaPorte-Centro-501 and her Court do travel to the nearer communities; beyond that we audition and pay standard rates to local talent.
You may wonder why our festival is “Wheel Days.” I don’t want to grab credit from anyone, but actually that was my idea. The whole Belt, it’s like a big wheel, and the Settlement like a smaller wheel riding its rim. Our conviction is that LaPorte-Centro-501 will grow into its motto: “The Hub of the Industrial Center of the Solar System.” You don’t need to laugh… it could happen. Something will be the hub, and it might as well be us. We have talent, room to grow, resources, skilled labor, willingness to work… and most of all, we have vision.
That’s how come we have Wheel Days, and nobody’s laughed for the last nine years. We have the most successful annual festival for a community our size in the Settlement. And that’s a big job. Everyone has two major assignments and half a dozen little ones, and of course we’re all still employed, though some of our employers cut us some slack now and then. As for me, being junior vice president of Mutual Savings & Loan, I could spend pretty much my whole time on it, which is good because it took that and more. If you aren’t a Chamber member, wherever you are, then you can’t understand just how frantic those last weeks are. No matter how you plan all year (and if you don’t plan all year, you don’t have a good festival) something always comes unglued. Several somethings.
Our float came apart in a spin vortex at Rimrock, and we were charged with Insufficient Construction. (Luckily our insurance company’s lawyers found we had a case against the designated construct company for fraud, and none of the young ladies on the float were hurt.) Still, the accident might deter some parade entries at our end. Simmons Sewer reported that they couldn’t fill all the porta-potty order because they had just gotten a contract from Outreach Frames (the big shipbuilding firm). Conway, Murray’s friend in Jinnits, broke up with his wife and threatened to leave the band; the band leader called Murray and said that if Conway left him in the lurch he wasn’t about to do any favors for Conway’s buddies. And so on.
It wasn’t until three days before the opening that I wore the light blue zipsuit again, and heard something crackle in the breast pocket. I fished it out and found the message tape I’d never read. Now I read it.
In-laws are an old joke, right? That’s because so many of them are just like the stories. My wife Peg is sweet, loving, bright, independent, and not half-bad-looking, either. But her brothers—! There’s James Perowne, who’s a drunk, and Gerald LaMott, who’s probably the reason why James is a drunk, and then there’s Ernest. Ernest Dinwiddie, if you can believe it, which I couldn’t when I first met him, and I laughed, and he never forgave me. He suits his name, is the best I can say for him, and it isn’t much.
The way Peg and I get along, you’d think I’d like her brothers and they’d like me, but that’s not how it is. James will fling a half-pickled arm around my shoulders and breathe beery sighs at me about his lovely little sister while I hold my breath and try not to slug him. Gerald sits hunched behind something (table, computer, desk… a pillow if all else fails), staring at me with little bright eyes out from under his dark brows and expecting me to make an ass of myself. Peg says she never could play a piece on the piano (and she’s good) when Gerald was staring at her. He has that way of looking at you, expecting you to fail, almost longing for you to fail, and then you do. And then there’s Ernest.
Ernest is in middle management at Central Belt Mining & Exploration. He’s told us about it, and about how important middle management is, and how important Central Belt Mining & Exploration is. Well, I know that. Anyone in finance in the Belt knows how important CBM&E is. He explained to Peg exactly why she shouldn’t marry me, and to me exactly why I wasn’t worthy of her, and from time to time he shows up to explain what we’ve done wrong between the last visit and this one. He asks detailed questions about every aspect of our lives, and gives the impression that he’d like to hire investigators to verify our answers.
Also he can’t take a hint. Most people, if you tell them that you’re going to be busy the weekend they want to visit, will shrug and say too bad and go on. Not Ernest. He showed up in the middle of our honeymoon, to see how things were going. He brought his whole family to help celebrate my fortieth birthday (when Peg and I had planned to spend a weekend alone, having farmed Gordie out with her best friend Lisa). For the past three years or so, we’d managed to avoid him by being “gone” when he came to LaPorte-Centro-501. This time we were stuck.