Late80s
From CleanPosts
THE LATE EIGHTIES
1985
In the Eighth and final Lustrum Hunky-Dory crafted eight new songs over the first few months of the year.
Robyn sold her Big Vogue, which was the second one ever built, and bought an Animatech Songmaster. This was a synthesizer built in the shape of an electric guitar. It had great live performance dynamics. Robyn would play the keyboard with her right hand and bend the notes with her left hand along the neck strip. With the Songmaster she could make a perfect reproduction of the famous "hammer on" technique of cascading guitar notes. So Dory was bounced back into her original position as bassist.
From the Songmaster Robyn evoked lush textures of sound, and the rest of the band came in dubbing layer after layer within a framework of a brief, punchy 36 minutes of music. They titled it Impotent America Entranced.
In the first song, Dubbed Leftist By the Righteous, Dory came in with a gentle bass line, accompanied by Robyn with some cool licks on a electric piano patch before the song suddenly transitioned to another rocker clocking in at about four minutes. Here Dory's lyrics took a dig at the current political climate of Ronald Reagan's so-called Morning in America. It was one of the four hits on the composition.
Girl and girl go for a whirl It unbalances you, sundazzles you Aggravates the pure hate within you So headline me, stigmatize me Might makes fright so invite all to fight me!
This over a backward-masking electric boogie shuffle carefully designed to be a red flag for holy roller types. Subversive as hell, a call to revolt, yet Dubbed was a very accessible track to a mass public which either didn't get the lyrics or ignored them for the minimal arrangement and synth-pop hooks.
The driving beat and anthemic melody of the instrumental first part of You Are Here was actually used as the title music for a short-lived (six episodes) syndicated show about fashion models called "Runway" which gave them another television credit but nothing to write home about in terms of residuals.
The classy, urbane second part of the song was the group trying its hand at a little twelve-bar blues, with Robyn doing an impression of a sultry 1940's era torch song diva.
Then Hunky started pounding her drumkit at 132 beats per minute (still no drum machines for Hunky-Dory) while Robyn laid down a crystal sheen and made some rather sensuous sounds which weren't even words, exactly. Dory's bass reached a plateau and the band grooved out to the end of side one. You Are Here part III wasn't radio friendly at all, but a lot of horny teen-aged boys bought the record just to get this song.
Then the listener flipped the record over and heard the album's biggest hit, Thumper Bait, a more-or-less conventional three minute rocker about fleshly temptation that was getting the most airplay for the song and heavy rota- tion on cable TV for the video. Thumper Bait didn't name names, but enough television evangelists saw a shoe that fit and wore it. The more they blasted the song from their pulpits, the more they only jacked up more sales for Hunky-Dory.
After a quiet intro, Responsibility Boundaries surprised the listener with Hunky's sudden attack of brutal drums and Dory's sinuous distorted bass. Here Robyn made a scathing four minute put down of bystanders who watch a rape in broad daylight but "don't want to get involved," as if it were merely a live sex show put on for their amusement. It touched a raw nerve, for this seemed as common as purse snatching in the 1980. Many listeners took a hard look in the mirror, and hopefully they changed.
Chunk Tide was a strange understated seven minute instrumental raga which muted itself in wandering tones just at the moment one expected it to break out into glorious fanfare. It was supposed to be a sad instrumental accompaniment for an oil spill oozing up on the shores of a pristine beach. Some people called this track "filler" but it was an effective, moody little slab of ambient and it balanced the intensity of the rest of the album.
Drug Century closed the piece out with a paradox: A pro-legalization stand and, simultaneously, a tirade about the wasted lives and misery of drug dependency. It perfectly capped the band's breaking of as many taboos, traditions, and official government positions as was possible in 36 minutes.
When the band felt good enough about the new material to jump back into the shit, they started booking gigs in small venues to be seen by music critics and get written up in the trade 'zines again.
The album became a long lived back-catalog classic, never selling less than about two or three hundred units a week and providing a steady income from royalties that no one sneezed at.
Hunky Dory was at the zenith of their popularity, although not by any means in the same league as bands like Deth Pepper or Head. Sisters Anita and Nicole Phillips of Head were wowed by Hunky-Dory in a River City club and asked them to join their 1986 tour, starting with a date in Los Angeles. So the Eighth Lustrum was the longest one yet, running for two years, to make up for the half-assed Lustrum of 1980.
1986
"Shit, Lil, it's slipping!"
Robyn had gotten past the halfhearted pat down at the box office without being stopped, but she neglected to wrap the tape carefully around her ankle, and a bottle of brandy slid down the inside of her pants leg and shattered on the blacktop.
Lilith didn't break her stride or even look back. "You brought that in here?" she gasped, with mock indignation. That brought knowing chuckles to some of the others walking on the long, crowded, landscaped path leading to the Harvey Downs Amphitheater. Lilith was probably hoping her own bottle wouldn't slip next.
Headlining the show was Head, also from River City, touring on the heels of switching to Discord Records and releasing their biggest album ever. Most established bands put out new albums with one or maybe two hits on it, tops. But not Head, not this time, with their fourth LP bearing no less than four solid stadium rockers on it, classics that would henceforth play for all eternity on FM rock radio: "No Love Lost," "Forever," "Pipe Dreams," and "All Or Nothing." The ladies of Hunky-Dory were all flattered and honored to open for them.
As Robyn and Lilith picked their way to their seats the band was warming up, with Hunky beating out a long drum solo and Dory doing some improvisation on electric bass.
The Hunky-Dory "gimmick" since the Suicide Club days was a sort of bad-girl mystique. They encouraged the rampant rumors floating around that the lead singer was wanted by the law (which was in fact the case). The Thumper Bait video used a flying spot scanner to make a cloud of blurry squares around Robyn's face, and this just added fuel to the fire.
Robyn's brand new body originally belonged Ursula's fifteen year old daughter Xenia, who was in the first batch of second-generation WDF members. Men who thought they were in love with Robyn from listening to her sultry voice would be dismayed when they learned she was actually jail bait, not just thumper bait. Joy was equally dismayed that her mother was now exactly the same age as her own twin daughters.
Lilith pointed out to Robyn that besides the usual concert bouncers there was a heavy law enforcement presence around and behind the stage. They had formed a gauntlet up there, determined to intercept the mystery woman if and when she showed up. Lilith wanted to abort the whole thing, but there there was no stopping it now. The presence of blue-jacketed FBI, the Orange County sheriff, and Irvine city police merely added to the crowd's feeling of anticipation.
By an unspoken signal, part of the crowd suddenly rushed down to fill up the space in front of the stage. Robyn and Lilith started diving over the newly vacated seats to join them, pushing their way through them right up to the edge of the stage. After a word from Dory to a couple of bouncers, Robyn and Lilith were physically pulled up onto the stage.
The crowd, clued in on the Hunky-Dory mythos, cheered the clever way Robyn had bypassed the heat behind the stage, and they began to grow excited.
Tubby low tones began boinging out of the bass guitar Dory strapped on, interacting with the aptly-named Hunky, who was beating the crap out of her drumkit. Hunky was powerful, and her great deal of physical stamina combined with an artistic ability to improvise her rythyms in, and around, and under Dory's more precise bass lines to give Head a very unusual but organic sound. As with the 1975 album, it was Dory who kept perfect time, and Hunky's drums were the "human" element of subtle randomness.
Sometimes Hunky put down her drum sticks and rushed out with Lilith to function as an extra bouncer if any over-exuberant fans managed to slip through the line of security.
Robyn played loud, futuristic, and intricate synthesizer lines on her Songmaster, a different palette of tones for every song. Occasionally he would throw in a few stabs or honks for effect. Her trademark patch was an artificial "guitar" sound that was hard to tell apart from the real thing, especially when she went hog wild and started to "jam".
Meanwhile Robyn and Dory ranged all over the stage, dancing, doing the flashy legwork of putting on a good show. All the boyfans (and some of the girls too) were already in love with Dory, who had aged remarkably well, because legs were the last thing to go on a woman, but now some of the fans were getting their first clear look at the new Robyn. She hoped they liked what they saw.
The Change to Robyn wrought by the Artifact provided incredible control over her voice. She could mimic almost any female singing voice after listening to a single tune, from operatic sopranos to sexy coos and snarls. It was her voice, in fact, that had impressed Deth Pepper's Phillips sisters.
The roar and whistling of the crowd rose to a deafening level.
"Good evening, Los Angeles! It's good to be out of the River City rain for a while. I'm Robyn. My friends Hunky and Dory are gonna play some tunes with me, starting with this old familiar standby--"
Robyn was interrupted by police and FBI agents swarming the stage from its perimeter, apparently on a prearranged signal. One of the feds flashed his badge to Robyn and said, "Kimberly Lokken, you're under arrest for espionage."
Good luck with that, Robyn though. Fingerprints and age won't match. Still, Hunky, Dory, and Lilith were cited for "harboring a fugitive".
Robyn decided to appeal to her fans. "Hey folks, it looks like the pigs don't want us to play for you tonight! What do you say to that?"
The crowd expressed their great displeasure, booing, throwing stuff at the stage, pushing the security guys back and some of them even wedged between the bouncers and clambered up onto the stage to confront the cops. A riot was a hair's-breadth away and the agent-in-charge knew it. He made a chop- ping motion with his hand. The men released the band and returned to their positions just off-stage. They could afford to wait.
The crowd cheered again, excited by this full-participation theater Hunky- Dory was putting on. It was all quite a great warm up for Head. Robyn wasn't sure how long they'd get to play before the hammer of the Law dropped again so she told the band to play Thumper Bait.
The opening bars of the biggest hit from Impotent America Entranced filled the stadium, and the fans went wild. Robyn put on her smoky natural voice, which carried over to the new body, and she started belting it out.
Your goody-good book bible Baptist bitches are gonna know this time! Date her, mate her, take good notes and rate her, You hypocrite! But you don't know She's Thumper Bait!
Booze her, use her Try your best to lose her Cruise holy writ for a reason why! She's thumper bait!
Eve was framed by Adam But blaming the victim won't fly this time! Jump her, pump her, then go ahead and dump her, Tell yourself it's to save her soul. She's Thumper Bait!"
Stalk her, block her Get your flock to mock her She won't submit to the status quo! She's thumper bait!
Dory had just launched into the blistering slapped bass solo that bridged to the middle third of the song when shots began to ring out.
Hunky, who served with Lilith in the Arab-Israeli conflict, had wonderful reflexes. On the sound of the first shot she dived into the crowd in front of the stage and slunk away.
Lilith tackled Robyn and likewise took her into the crowd and out of danger from bullets, if not from stampeding feet.
But Dory had no such experience or bodyguard. She fell forward with the momentum of a bullet and found herself face down on the stage in a widening pool of blood, with a tiny hole in her back. There was no pain, which was the strangest thing.
In the sudden silence Dory stood back up and the crowd saw a much larger hole in her chest from a hollowed out dum dum bullet. Without hesitating Dory dived straight out into the audience.
Some caught her, getting splattered and soaked in blood, others backed away, and she sank to the ground.
"How can you still live like that?" someone asked.
Dory tried, but she couldn't answer. Hydrostatic shock had burst the walls of nearly every cell in her heart and lungs. But due to her now alien brain, for a brief time she could still act.
Dory began taking off her clothes while she ran to make herself a more difficult moving target. Disbelief became confusion, and confusion became a panic that was just beginning to take hold of the concert-goers. But there were still enough hesitating people around to provide cover.
Now Dory was just wearing her silver bikini. She was an anonymous concert- goer like Robyn and Lilith had been when they arrived, except that she was missing a lot of her chest. A bubble of blood formed at her mouth and popped. Her upper lungs were shattered, but when Dory saw Robyn and Lilith she managed to rasp out, "Get me to the RV."
Hunky didn't wait around to get picked up. She faded into the chaos swirling throughout the amphitheater, avoiding the official Head tour bus, now crawling with cops, and made her way toward General Parking, where Lilith had parked the Winnebago that she and Robyn arrived in.
But the further Dory walked, helped along by Lilith and Robyn, the more her legs began to stumble as oxygen starvation finally took a toll and killed her muscles. At the edge of the parking lot she sank to the ground, helplessly staring out, unable to move so much as a finger or utter a single word. Dory's brain still lived, and the nerves were still sending signals, but no muscle was left alive to obey them.
Dory Fuchs was dead at age sixty, after an eventful life. Soon Hunky ar- rived to help carry Dory's body the rest of the way to the Winnebago. Hunky was crying despite knowing that Dory would soon be alive again.
Robyn told Lilith, quite needlessly, "Drive. Get us out of here."
It would take thirty minutes or so just to get out of the parking lot, be- cause the congestion was compounded by police who were slowing the vehicles as they left and checking the occupants with flashlights. When it was their turn Lilith didn't stop, but plowed right through the checkpoint and out onto the highway.
Thick traffic prevented any police or federal agents from following them immediately, but there was no doubt that their description and plate number were being radioed ahead. Only one thing was in the band's favor: they weren't the only vehicle of interest. Some of the concert goers were on parole or had a lot of drugs in their car, and they panicked at the check- point and rushed through too.
Lilith drove to a prearranged spot far from I-405. Soon Michelle rolled up with Olivia and Karen, one driving a van and the other a sedan.
Lilith told Hunky to get in the sedan and get back to the safe house in Long Beach. Then she took out the Golden Gift, which had been strapped to her other ankle, not the one with the booze, and she separated Dory's head from her body. Then she took the head with herself and Robyn in Olivia's van.
Dory's headless body was left in the RV, where (they learned later) it was picked up by the authorities and identified by fingerprints.
It was one thing to lose a court case and try to arrest Robyn. At the time she admitted it was her own fault for not seeing that coming. It was quite another thing to murder Dory. Robyn said, "A state of war now exists be- tween Femina Caelestis and the United States of America."
1987
As he was requested, Brand Millet joined his grandmother Robyn in the Exec- utive Lounge, high up on the eastern end of Fortuna with its huge windows. Robyn made a point of conducting this interview outside of the presence of his mother and father, lest he feel constrained in his answers.
Brand was still breathing hard from a match of Freeball, trying to catch up on his oxygen deficit, and he wished he could have showered first, but Robyn was anxious to speak to him. "Congratulations on the big win," she told him.
"Thanks! I understand you are a fan of the Red team, though. Sorry about that."
"It's okay," she shrugged, "I'm in for the long haul. The extremely long haul. Someday the Reds will be unstoppable. But now that you're eighteen it's time to talk about your own future, Brand."
"Because I have knowledge that could end your macro monopoly," Brand suggested. He had a way of cutting to the heart of the matter that Robyn admired.
"True! And that's precisely why we've taken great pains to protect you from certain people within the American federal government who would dearly love to set their claws into you. There are things you have learned that your sisters Chayn and Del have not."
"So you're saying it's still not safe for me to go to Earth."
"Brand, I think that option is closed to you for now. You're not Femina Caelestis. If you were put to torment you would have no way to shut your- self down."
"But if I stay here I would be living on the inheritance of my mother and father, and I would be, in effect, still their dependent. So Gramma, I find that I want to strike out on my own. I want to build an inheritance for my own son, should I become a father someday."
"In that event," Robyn answered, "you should think of our settlements on Mars or even in the asteroids. You could live with us as a man pulling your own weight. I can't promise you'll ever get rich that way, but that is a possibility."
"Robyn, I love my whole Femina Caelestis family, but I feel smothered by you sometimes. And there's a problem I've noticed among my friends. Every girl they fall in love with eventually gets rotated to Data Storage and becomes someone else on them."
"The human male is genetically predisposed to be unfaithful," she told him. "For every one of those boyfriends who complain about their girlfriend get- ting a new body all the time, there's four more that think it's pretty nifty."
"Well, what I really want to know is this: can you give me a ship?"
"Give you one? Dearest, I'm a capitalist at heart. I can sell you a ship, but it would take everything you have in your account, and even then I would be letting it go at a discount, because I love you and your parents."
"Do you have a particular ship in mind?"
"You can buy my frigate the Chivalrous. It's the one that's been out to Jupiter and back. It would serve you well."
"People say Jupiter belongs to the nephilim."
"Have you've forgotten the Fortuna Summit already, Brand? You were there. The nephilim from Centauri are permitted to colonize Jupiter and all the outer planets. That doesn't mean humans are forbidden to go there."
"Do the nephilim know that?"
"They do, but some of them probably don't like it. To be on the safe side, Chivalrous is a pretty lethal warship, so you won't be totally unarmed. But consider my offer carefully, Brand. The ship will literally cost every Solyad you have, and you will be cut totally loose. Femina Caelestis would be discharged of any further obligation toward you."
He lit up at this. "You mean I'll be on my own at last?"
"Absolutely free. If you go down, kiddo, you'll get no handout from us."
"Gramma, it's a deal, if you will agree to one simple condition."
"Name it, and I'll see what I can do."
"I am going to make a decision for all the women who will be in my life, for my future girlfriend, or wife, for any daughters I might have, and for all of their daughters, and so on. Swear to me now that none of them will ever be allowed to join Femina Caelestis."
"Brand! Do you really hate me that much?"
"I don't hate you grandmother. I never did. But there's...something about Femina Caelestis. I can't quite put my finger on it. All I know is that it's very important that I have your word on this."
"You're right, you are on to something, Brand, and it is very important. I can't tell you anything right now, but someday you and I will have another chat just like this, and I will tell you everything, and you will be amazed at your own intuition. But in the meantime, grandson mine, you have my word: neither your girlfriend, nor your wife, nor your mistress, nor any female descendant of yours shall be permitted to undergo the Change."
"Thank you."
* * * * *
When Brand left the Moon with a full tank of water, he had to decide where to go. All he knew was he wanted to get very far away from Femina Caelestis. That ruled out the Moon and Mars. And the FC was starting to creep into the asteroid belt too.
As far as making a living went, ice prospecting was all that Brand knew how to do (from helping his father mine the south pole of the Moon), but there was not enough water on board to go to Saturn. Well, there was enough to do a Saturn fly-by, but not to stop there. Brand's choices were whittled down to basically just Jupiter. So he did the calculations and made the departure burn.
There was plenty of food aboard but no showers were possible during the transit, only sponge baths, and once every two days Brand would wash his hair in a plastic bubble with elastic collars for the neck and both arms to contain the water. There was nothing like a good shampoo to make him feel like a million Solyad again.
But it was a long and boring transit to Jupiter. The bridge was lit with dim blue lights and the constant hisses and whistles and chatter on the HF band tended to lull him to sleep. Once every week or so he would have an honest-to-God real contact, another ship passing in the night "only" a hundred thousand miles away.
* * * * *
"Here is my problem," Dory told the other members of the band, plus Lilith, when they were all gathered together one time at Midway. "I have a secret to tell you, but keeping secrets in Femina Caelestis is impossible. As soon as you trade in your body for another one, and some other chick gets that body, she instantly knows all your secrets."
"I already know Dory's secret," Hunky added, "because we share everything. And I agree we need to keep this among ourselves somehow. It's that explosive."
Lilith thought about it for a moment, then said, "The only way we can keep Dory's secret is to promise never to trade the bodies we have now until they drop dead from under us. We can do that, you know. We are Seraphim."
"I will make that promise," Robyn said. "I trust Hunky and Dory to know when something is that important."
"Then I also make the promise," Lilith said. "This isn't a bad body. I'll keep it until it dies of old age or, more likely, gets killed in the next Arab-Israeli war."
"So tell them what's on your mind, Dor," Hunky prodded. She, of course, already knew what was up.
Dory said, "The same thing that makes it so hard for me to keep a secret also makes it hard for Jill and Gina to keep their secret. Harder for them, actually, since they swap bodies, it seems, at least once a year. And so when I took possession of this body after I was shot last year in California, the whole dirty mess came out."
Dory paused. Robyn and Lilith were intrigued. They both said, together, "And?"
"We've known from the beginning that 'Jill' was an artificial construct, patched together from our old friends Jerry Shy Bear and Inge Hahn, and it was mostly Jerry. Admit it Robyn. When Joy did something that made you proud, which was often, you wanted to share it with Jill. You knew Jerry was still in there."
"That's true."
"Well, it turns out that sometime back in the Sixties, the Jerry and Inge personalities were split up again. There is no Jill, not any more. Back when we recorded 'Sell Out' that wasn't really Jill playing with us, that was someone else, and there was just enough Jerry still in there to keep playing the guitar, but you all have to admit she wasn't very good, and it was the last time she played with us."
"So who are we dealing with here?" Robyn asked. "Who is that Seraphim who calls herself Jill?"
"It's Gina," Dory revealed. She pointed to her own head. "The evidence is right up here."
"There's two Ginas?" Lilith asked, shocked at the implications.
"Worse than that. Femina Caelestis currently has about, what, a hundred folks in this star system? Well four of them wear their head in a bun. We call them Bunners for laughs, but there's nothing funny about it."
"And you think they're all copies of Gina?"
"Think about it, Robyn. Gina, Jill, Penny, and Nyla. You've seen how creepy they act when they're together. They all move as though they all were Sharing through Wi-Fi, even when none of them are wearing adaptors."
Lilith nodded, and said, "I admit I have observed that behavior, but I assumed it was just a thing they did in their little Bunner clique."
"Let us proceed on the assumption that Dory is right," Robyn said. "How would this 'cancer' get started in the first place?"
"I'm thinking it's something that's bound to happen," Lilith said. "It's built right into the process. It hasn't happened to us because none of us has swapped bodies more than once. You, Robyn, and Hunky are still original. But Jill and Gina were always a little vain, if you ask me. They always wanted to wear the youngest, newest model. And their boyfriends always egg them on."
"So what happened to Jill will happen to us someday?" Robyn asked. "It's just taking us longer?"
"I think so," Hunky said. "We can plot it out on a Lotus spreadsheet to see what happened and maybe predict what's going to happen."
"Gina already did that," Dory said. "In the Sixties she did it on paper. In the Seventies she did it with VisiCalc on an Apple II, and now in the Eighties with Lotus 1-2-3 on an IBM PC. Maybe the first incident just 'happened' to her, when Jill disappeared, but she's been deliberately cultivating it ever since."
"The math is a little fuzzy to me," Hunky said, "but if 'x' percent of Femina Caelestics is Gina now, maybe in just a few more decades, the bun- ners will be more than half. And she will own the whole show."
"It'll never go that far," Robyn said. "Right now there's at least fifty Amazons for every WDF member, so no the Bunners will never take over. We can just keep importing more Amazons."
"Let's see you say that when we see the first Amazon Bunner," Hunky said, full of rue.
"Well, look," Robyn went on, "the Bunners are using the Artifact to make the Change. Eventually the last needle in the Artifact will be expended. After that the only source for the Change will be the elohim who created the Artifact in the first place, which was me."
"When will that be?" Dory asked.
"Oh, about 2099."
"Shit."
"Can we be sure the Bunners won't reverse engineer the Artifact?" Lilith asked. "Human beings are rather clever monkeys after all."
"It would be difficult but not impossible," Robyn admitted. "We'll need to confiscate it from them somehow."
"You're taking about an action that will hurl the WDF into civil war," Dory pointed out.
"It's too late. Gina has been planning this move for years. So we are forced to make a radical change."
"What do you mean?" Hunky asked.
"Possession of living human bodies was sufficient to get us started, but now we're going to need to do something completely different. We need to figure out a way to impose our consciousness on machines."
"You're talking about artificial intelligence," Dory said. "A pipe dream from the dawn of the computer age."
"Yes that's true, we will need to develop machine consciousness in the first place before we can try to shape it to match our own personalities. But think about the payoff. No more down time! We will be conscious even during our periods of Data Storage. We already have a very primitive virtual reality on the Grid, but with AI we will literally live inside the Grid, full time. And robots can be made far more capable than mere human flesh. They can even be sexy."
"So you are announcing a crash program to develop AI?" Lilith asked.
"That's exactly right, Sugarbear."
"We'll need a code name so the Bunners don't catch on," she pointed out, ever the professional soldier.
"Let's call it Project Hope."
1988
Jupiter and its moons made a miniature solar system within the solar system, some 32 million miles across if you counted all the asteroids scooped up in the planet's gravity. It was really a system only two million miles across if you considered it to be just Jupiter, four big moons, and small change. Still, even this smaller version was four times bigger than the Earth-Luna system and there was a lot more to see.
Brand selected an elliptical orbit that allowed him to view all the major moons close up, one after the other. On one orbit, as Jupiter eclipsed the sun, Brand spotted a very thin backlit ring. It was deep within the gravity well of Jupiter. When he circularized his descent ellipse the ship was run- ning on fumes. Certainly he did not have sufficient water to escape again. So it was a gamble.
It was a narrow set of ringlets, far skimpier than the glorious rings of Saturn, but no one else was mining the ice there. It was cherry! Brand snuggled Chivalrous in among the ice and pulled up next to a thirty footer.
With a little hot water still in the ship's tanks, a space suited Brand melted a hole into the ice and secured an umbilical between the ship and the ice ball. He got a cycle going, with hot water melting the ice, and cold melt water being sucked back into the ship's tanks. Part of the new water was diverted, heated, and cycled back out to the ball to melt some more ice. In a week he had the tanks nearly full again, and the ice ball was a jagged mess.
Then Brand got underway again, and found a hundred footer near the outer edge of the ring. He attached a transmitter to it, and then gently rammed the front of Chivalrous against it before bringing the ship's engines up to full power. The ice ball blocked the impact of the remaining smaller ice- balls on the ring's edge as they plowed their way out into clear space.
When sufficient velocity had been obtained to send the ice ball towards Earth, Brand started braking Chivalrous with retrofire. Through the front view port he watched his ice ball shrink to a point. He patted himself on the back. It would be only only two years transit time from Jupiter to Earth, instead of the six years from Saturn to Earth. But he himself ran out of time when he noticed a clump of his hair drifting in the air.
The radiation from Jupiter's much larger version of the Van Allen belts had piled up too fast. Hair was falling out and he started throwing up all the time. Now Brand understood why no one had mined the ring of Jupiter. He went to the L-2 point at the backside of Io to hide from Jupiter and recover.
There he took a remedy from Gorpai called CureAll to fix the leukemia that developed. This drug was completely unnecessary back at Fortuna. Every member of Femina Caelestis had glorified hands, the gift of Yeshua Bat-El, and they could cure anything with a mere touch.
While he was nursing his health back, the orange and yellow and red pizza moon Io beckoned to him below. The Chivalrous had landing legs that folded down, so it was possible to go to the surface of relatively small bodies like the moon Io. Brand landed on a powdery white gypsum plain.
He gazed out at the scene. Io was a cornucopia of mineral wealth, but it was a violent place. There were hundreds of volcanoes and constant quakes, gas vents, and geysers of molten sulfur caused by Jupiter's tidal grip on the satellite interacting with the eccentricity of the moon's orbit, which itself was maintained by a gravitational resonance with two other large moons of Jupiter.
There was a strong return on radar about twenty-two miles to the southeast. It could be an outcropping of metal ore. Brand didn't have a separate vehicle to check it out. He had to fire up Chivalrous and use the whole ship to make a little hop to the contact.
When he arrived he found a fresh sinkhole, with some type of machine half- swallowed by it. Brand donned his spacesuit to make the short walk over and investigate.
If someone was inside, Brand at least knew why he hadn't picked up a dis- tress call. There was an antenna that had been snapped clean off. He picked up a stone and banged on the exterior, then set his helmet against the ma- chine to hear any reply (since sound could not travel well at all in Io's extremely thin air).
Presently there came a metallic return banging, so Brand interpreted that as an invitation to try the inflatable air lock in the rear of the large machine.
Inside was a tall woman Brand found to be extremely beautiful despite being knocked around a little by the walls of the tilting machine. "You've come to save me!" she yelped, throwing herself on him and squeezing him hard.
He took off his helmet. "I'm Brand Millet."
"Jabniel," she said, touching the hair rolled in at her shoulders that was so blond it was white. She was, in fact, of the House of Gerash. "I've been stuck here for days."
What is this thing?"
"This is one of my father's topsoil harvesters. A sinkhole opened right up under me while I was working."
"Why didn't your father come looking for you?"
"I'm sure he is. But this place is the size of Earth's moon, you know. I flew the harvester down from orbit and this looked like a good spot. My father doesn't have a clue where to start looking."
"Maybe I can pull you out."
"It won't do any good, I'll still be stuck here. The front of the harvester is crushed."
"Well, Jabniel, get your suit on and we'll walk to my ship."
"I don't have a suit. Look, I live on my father's ship. I just get in the harvester, come down here and drive around until it's full, fly back to the ship, and my brothers empty the bins and get the harvester ready for the next day. I've been doing this since I was a doll of eleven and nothing ever happened. I never needed a suit."
"When you take such little regard for your own safety, you're not thinking about those who love you. I'll be back shortly."
Brand went to Chivalrous and obtained something like a body bag, but with hose fittings on it. When he returned to the harvester, he laid it out and asked Jabniel to crawl inside it. "This isn't a full-up spacesuit but it's the best I can do. It's used to transport wounded in airless places. I'm going to carry you to my ship."
So he zipped har up, plugged the bag into his suit to inflate it, and set out on foot back to his own ship, carrying har easily in the small gravity. With the sun glinting off his vacuum suit, Brand was literally Jabniel's Knight In White Shining Armor.
On his ship he plied Jabniel with food. Sha was starving after being trapped for so long. As he watched her eat and talk to him, stretching out the long bare legs of har seven foot frame and flashing smiles at him, Brand quietly and methodically fell in love.
Brand was luckier than he knew. Jabniel was a nephilim yin whose father was a White Beard from Sukai Island in the kingdom of Menkal, in the Land We Know. Sha herself had been born in space between the moons of Jupiter. And Jabs was a muffle, which meant that sha preferred human men.
Most of the men available to Jabniel were simple laborers, also from the Land We Know. The ones who had any money or property were few and far be- tween. Yet here was Brand with his own ship, and a fairly large ship at that. Obviously he was a man of means. Sha knew har father would be inter- ested in him as well, but in a totally different way.
Not realizing that Brand was smitten already, Jabniel didn't even dare to hope sha might land Brand. The trends were against it. Resigned to har fate, she told him where to go to rendezvous with her father's ship.
Naseth's ship was roughly the same size on the outside as the Chivalrous, with an identical macro, but there was somewhat more living space inside. The lesser volume of water tankage didn't matter, because Naseth never left the Jupiter system, where water was plentiful, especially at Europa, which had an ocean of water under a thin crust of ice.
Brand Millet returned Naseth's daughter to him with her virtue intact. Joy- ous at her safe return, Naseth invited Brand to abide with him for a while so he could show his gratitude.
The Naseth operation was moderately well-to-do. Naseth, his wife, and their two sons, with help from Jabniel, surface mined Io for the ever-renewing minerals that streaked the surface as the moon continuously turned itself inside-out. Brand's mother Joy had once done business with Naseth. Even some companies on Earth had recently become customers of his.
Naseth was a wise yang, and he could see the love Brand had for Jabniel written in his eyes as plain as could be, even if Jabniel herself, overcome with self-doubt, was blind to it.
But Naseth thought of his own interests as well. He began to speak time and again how important his daughter's role was to his family's livelihood, how she had been a good earner for years, and what a struggle it would be if she ever left. Naseth's clever ploy had the intended effect.
"I will serve you three years for the hand of your daughter Jabniel," Brand told him, taking the plunge.
Naseth was definitely willing. He knew Brand was the grandson of the human incarnation of Binah, the deity of his homeland of Menkal, and by that fact alone he would make a worthy son-in-law. Naseth said, "Daughter, do you agree to this?"
Har heart skipped a beat, but she regained her composure. "Let it be done as he said."
So Brand lived and worked with Naseth's family and put Chivalrous at the service of Naseth until the three years of his servitude were fulfilled. The Naseths prospered ever more, and although Brand never broke trust with Naseth and touched his daughter, the three years flew by as though they were as many weeks, because Brand loved Jabniel so greatly.
1989
During his three years of service to Naseth, the little ice ball Brand sent hurling towards Earth from Jupiter's ring, the one that cost him all the down time with illness, reached the vicinity of the Moon but apparently "broke cherry" in the lexicon of ice ball cowboys. That is, the individual whom Brand contracted to receive the ice and make payment, a Mr. Roth Ward- ian, took possession of the ice but never came through with the money. Brand sent messages to the WDF asking for help.
After discussing the matter with Joy and Blaine (who loved and missed their son very much) Robyn entered once again into a conversation with Brand. On this occasion, there was an hour and forty minutes of round trip travel time for the transmissions. It took several days. When Brand spelled out what happened, he asked Robyn if she could take care of his Roth Wardian problem.
Robyn agreed to look into it. As it turned out, Brand wasn't the first one Roth Wardian broke cherry with, he had quite a bad reputation back at Sat- urn. No one there would do business with him, which is why Brand found it so easy to get the contract with him.
With the money from Brand's hundred foot ice ball Roth went out to the asteroids, where Femina Caelestis lost his trail. When the angels picked his scent up again, they were ready to shove a Brushfire missile up his ass, but they ran into a little problem which Robyn explained to Brand several months after his first call.
"We know exactly where Roth Wardian is now," she said. "I'm including the one-line orbital elements for his rock in this transmission. Your computer can decipher them for you. But the thing is, Brand, we can't touch him. There's nothing to hit. He lives inside this cluster of boulders called the Gravel Pile. They're all just sort of floating there, more or less loosely held by gravity into a ball. If it was a solid rock we could crack it open maybe, but the Gravel Pile is already cracked. It's one thing to strike this asshole from a fighter in passing, but I'm not willing to send Girl Guards in there to dig him out. And I'm sure that's not what you're asking me to do. So accept my apologies and go with my love, Brand. Your mother and father send their love too. Better luck next time. Robyn, out."
