“We’ve gotten the IAA arbitration board to agree to take up the dispute,” said Ms. Mindy Rourke, Esq. She seemed very young to me to be a lawyer. I was especially fascinated by her long hair falling luxuriantly past her shoulders. She could only wear it like that on Earth. In a low-gee environment it would have spread out like a chestnut-colored explosion.
“I’ll have my day in court, then.”
“You won’t have to be physically present,” Ms. Rourke said. Then she added, with a doubtful little frown, “But I’m afraid the board usually bases its decisions on the maximum good for the maximum number of people. The Moralists will house ten thousand people in their habitat. All you’ve got is you.”
What she meant was that Art counted for nothing compared to the utilitarian purpose of grinding up my asteroid, smelting it, and using its metals as structural materials for an artificial world to house ten thousand religious zealots who want to leave Earth forever.
Sam stayed in touch with me electronically, and hardly a day passed that he did not call and spend an hour or more chatting with me. Our talk was never romantic, but each call made me love him more. He spoke endlessly about his childhood in Nebraska, or was it Baltimore? Sometimes his childhood tales were based in the rainy hillsides of the Pacific Northwest. Either he moved around ceaselessly as a child or he was amalgamating tales from many other people and adopting them as his own. I never tried to find out. If Sam thought of the stories as his own childhood, what did it matter?
Gradually, as the weeks slipped into months, I found myself speaking about my own younger years. The half-deserted mountain village where I had been born. The struggle to get my father to allow me to go to the university instead of marrying, “as a decent girl should.” The professor who broke my heart. The pain that sent me fleeing to this asteroid and the life of a hermit.
Sam cheered me up. He made me smile, even laugh. He provided me with a blow-by-blow description of his own activities as an entrepreneur. Not content with owning and operating the Earth View Hotel and running a freight-hauling business that ranged from low Earth orbit to the Moon and out as far as the new habitats being built in Sun-circling orbits, Sam was also getting involved in building tourist facilities at Moonbase as well.
“And then there’s this advertising scheme that these two guys have come up with. It’s kinda crazy, but it might work.”
The “scheme” was to paint enormous advertisement pictures in the ionosphere, some fifty miles or so above the Earth’s surface, using electron guns to make the gases up at that altitude glow like the aurora borealis. The men that Sam was speaking with claimed that they could make actual pictures that could be seen across whole continents.
“When the conditions are right,” Sam added. “Like, it’s gotta be either at dusk or at dawn, when the sky looks dark from the ground but there’s still sunlight up at the right altitude.”
“Not many people are up at dawn,” I said.
It took almost a full minute between my statement and his answer, I was so distant from his base in Earth orbit.
“Yeah,” he responded at last. “So it’s gotta be around dusk.” Sam grinned lopsidedly. “Can you imagine the reaction from the environmentalists if we start painting advertisements across the sky?”
“They’ll fade away within a few minutes, won’t they?”
The seconds stretched, and then he answered, “Yeah, sure. But can you picture the look on their faces? They’ll hate it! Might be worth doing just to give ’em ulcers!”
All during those long weeks and months I could hardly work up the energy to continue my carving. What good would it be? The whole asteroid was going to be taken away from me, ground into powder, destroyed forever. I knew what the International Astronautical Authority’s arbitrators would say: Moralists, ten thousand; Art, one.
For days on end I would stand at my console, idly fingering the keyboard, sketching in the next set of figures that the lasers would etch into the stone. In the display screen the figures would look weak, misshapen, distorted. Sometimes they glared at me accusingly, as if I was the one killing them.
Time and again I ended up sketching Sam’s funny, freckled, dear face.
I found reasons to pull on my space suit and go outside. Check the lasers. Adjust the power settings. Recalibrate the feedback sensors. Anything but actual work. I ran my gloved fingers across the faces of the hauqui, the guardian spirits I had carved into this metallic stone. It was a bitter joke. The hauqui needed someone to guard them from evil.
Instead of working, I cried. All my anger and hate was leaching away in the acid of frustration and waiting, waiting, endless months of waiting for the inevitable doom.
And then Sam showed up again, just as unexpectedly as the first time.
My asteroid, with me attached to it, had moved far along on its yearly orbit. I could see Earth only through the low-power telescope that I had brought with me, back in those first days when I had fooled myself into believing I would spend my free time in space studying the stars. Even in the telescope the world of my birth was nothing more than a blurry fat crescent, shining royal-blue.
My first inkling that Sam was approaching was a message I found typed on my comm screen. I had been outside, uselessly fingering my carvings. When I came in and took off my helmet I saw on the screen:
HAVE NO FEAR, SAM IS HERE.
WILL RENDEZVOUS WITH YOU IN ONE HOUR.
My eyes flicked to the digital clock reading. He would be here in a matter of minutes! At least this time I was wearing clothes, but still I looked a mess.
By the time his transport was hovering in a matching orbit and the pumps in my airlock were chugging, I was decently dressed in a set of beige coveralls he had not seen before, my hair was combed and neatly netted, and I had applied a bit of makeup to my face. My expression in the mirror had surprised me: smiling, nearly simpering, almost as giddy as a schoolgirl. Even my heart was skipping along merrily.
Sam came in, his helmet already off. I propelled myself over to him and kissed him warmly on the lips. He reacted in a typical Sam Gunn way. He gave a whoop and made three weightless cartwheels, literally heels over head, with me gripped tightly in his arms.
For all his exuberance and energy, Sam was a gentle, thoughtful lover. Hours later, as we floated side-by-side in my darkened quarters, the sweat glistening on our bare skins, he murmured:
“I never thought I could feel so … so ..
Trying to supply the missing word, I suggested, “So much in love?”
He made a little nod. In our weightlessness, the action made him drift slightly away from me. I caught him in my arms, though, and pulled us back together.
“I love you, Sam,” I whispered, as though it were a secret. “I love you.”
He gave a long sigh. I thought it was contentment, happiness even.
“Listen,” he said, “you’ve got to come over to the ship. Those two nutcases who want to paint the ionosphere are on their way to the Moralists’ habitat.”
“What does that have to do with …”
“You gotta meet them,” he insisted. Untangling from me, he began to round up his clothes, floating like weightless ghosts in the shadows. “You know what those Moralist hypocrites are going to call their habitat, once it’s finished? Eden! How’s that for chutzpah?”
He had to explain the Yiddish word to me. Eden. The Moralists wanted to create their own paradise in space. Well, maybe they would, although I doubted that it would be paradise for anyone who deviated in the slightest from their stern views of right and wrong.