It bore my name and several smudged stamps that I presume had been affixed to it by various post offices on its way to me. In the corner was the name and address of a legal firm: Skinner, Flaymen, Killum and Score, of Des Moines, Iowa, USA, Earth.
Wondering why they couldn’t have sent their message electronically, like everyone else, I struggled to open the envelope.
“Let me,” Sam said, taking one corner of it in two fingers and deftly slitting it with the minuscule blade of the tiniest pocket knife I had ever seen.
I pulled out a single sheet of heavy white parchment, so stiff that its edges could slice flesh.
It was a letter for me. It began, “Please be advised …”
For several minutes I puzzled over the legal wordings while Sam went over to the control console and busied himself checking out the instruments. Slowly the letter’s meaning became clear to me. My breath gagged in my throat. A searing, blazing knot of pain sprang up in my chest.
“What’s wrong?” Sam was at my side in a shot. “Cripes, you look like you’re gonna explode! You’re red as a fire engine.”
I was so furious I could hardly see. I handed the letter to Sam and managed to choke out, “Does this mean what I think it means?”
He scanned the letter quickly, then read it more slowly, his eyes going wider with each word of it.
“Jesus Christ on a crutch!” he shouted. “They’re throwing you off the asteroid!”
I could not believe what the letter said. We both read it half a dozen times more. The words did not change their meaning. I wanted to scream. I wanted to kill. The vision came to my mind of lawyers stripped naked and staked out over a slow fire, screaming for mercy while I laughed and burned their letter in the fire that was roasting their flesh. I looked around the command module wildly, looking for something to throw, something to break, anything to release the terrible, terrible fury that was building inside me.
“Those sons of bitches!” Sam raged. “Those slimy do-gooder bastards!”
The lawyers represented the Moralist Sect of The One True God, Inc. The letter was to inform me that the Moralists had notified the International Astronautical Authority that they intended to capture asteroid Aten 2004 EA and use it as structural material for the habitat they were building.
“They can’t do that!” Sam bellowed, bouncing around the bridge like a weightless Ping-Pong ball. “You were there first. They can’t throw you out like a landlord evicting a tenant!”
“The white man has taken the Indian’s lands whenever he chose to,” I said, seething.
He mistook my deathly quiet tone for acquiescence. “Not anymore! Not today. This is one white man who’s on the side of the redskins.”
He was so upset, so outraged, so vociferous that I felt my own fury cooling, calming. It was as if Sam was doing all my screaming for me.
“This letter,” I hissed, “says I have no choice.”
“Hell no, you won’t go,” Sam snapped. “I’ve got lawyers too, lady. Nobody’s going to push you around.”
“Why should you want to involve yourself?”
He shot me an unfathomable glance. “I’m involved. I’m involved. You think I can sit back and watch those Moralist bastards steal your rock? I hate it when some big outfit tries to muscle us little guys.”
It occurred to me that at least part of Sam’s motivation might have been to worm his way into my affection. And my pants. He would act the brave protector of the weak, and I would act the grateful weakling who would reward him with my somewhat emaciated body. From the few words that the taciturn biologist had said at dinner, and from my observation of Sam’s own behavior, it seemed to me that he had a Casanova complex: he wanted every woman he saw.
And yet—his outrage seemed genuine enough. And yet—the instant he saw me he said I was beautiful, even though clearly I was not.
“Don’t you worry,” Sam said, his round little face grim and determined. “I’m on your side and we’ll figure out some way to stick this letter up those lawyers’ large intestines.”
“But the Moralist Sect is very powerful.”
“So what? You’ve got me, kiddo. All those poor praying sonsofbitches have on their side is God.”
I was still angry and confused as Sam and I climbed back into our space suits and he returned me to my pod on my—no, the asteroid. I felt a burning fury blazing within me, bitter rage at the idea of stealing my asteroid away from me. They were going to break it up and use it as raw material for their habitat!
Normally I would have been screaming and throwing things, but I sat quietly on the two-person scooter as we left the airlock of Sam’s ship. He was babbling away with a mixture of bravado, jokes, obscene descriptions of lawyers in general and Moralists in particular. He made me laugh. Despite my fears and my fury, Sam made me laugh and realize that there was nothing I could do about the Moralists and their lawyers at the moment, so why should I tie myself into knots over them? Besides, I had a more immediate problem to deal with.
Sam. Was he going to attempt to seduce me once we were back at my quarters? And if he did, what would my reaction be? I was shocked at my uncertainty. Three years is a long time, but to even think of allowing this man …
“You got a lawyer?” His voice came through the earphones of my helmet.
“No. I suppose the university will represent me. Legally, I’m their employee.”
“Maybe, but you…” His voice choked off. I heard him take in his breath, like a man who has just seen something that overpowered him.
“Is that it?” Sam asked in an awed voice.
The Sun was shining obliquely on The Rememberer, so that the figures I had carved were shown in high relief.
“It’s not finished,” I said. “It’s hardly even begun.”
Sam swerved the little scooter so that we moved slowly along the length of the carvings. I saw all the problems, the places that had to be fixed, improved. The feathered serpent needed more work. The Mama Kilya, the Moon Mother, was especially rough. But I had to place her there because the vein of silver in the asteroid came up to the surface only at that point and I needed to use the silver as the tears of the Moon.
Even while I picked out the weak places in my figures I could hear Sam’s breathing over the suit radio. I feared he would hyperventilate. For nearly half an hour we cruised slowly back and forth across the face of the asteroid, then spiraled around to the other side.
The one enormous advantage of space sculpture, of course, is the absence of gravity. There is no need for a base, a stand, a vertical line. Sculpture can be truly three-dimensional in space, as it was meant to be. I had intended to carve the entire surface of the asteroid.
“It’s fantastic,” Sam said at last, his voice strangely muted. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I’ll be hung by the cojones before I’ll let those double-talking bastards steal this away from you!”
At that moment I began to love Sam Gunn.
True to his word, Sam got his own lawyers to represent me. A few days after Adam Smith disappeared from my view, on its way to the Moralists’ construction site, I was contacted by the firm of Whalen and Krill, of Port Canaveral, Florida, USA, Earth.
The woman who appeared on my comm screen was a junior partner in the firm. I was not important enough for either of the two senior men. Still, that was better than my university had done: their legal counsel had told me bleakly that I had no recourse at all and I should abandon my asteroid forthwith.